Texas Instruments ASC System Room

Color. The Advanced Scientific Computer, or ASC, was a supercomputer architecture designed by Texas Instruments (TI) between 1966 and 1973. Key to the ASC's design was a single high-speed shared memory, which was accessed by a number of processors and channel controllers, in a fashion similar to Seymour Cray's groundbreaking CDC 6600. Whereas the 6600 featured ten smaller computers feeding a single math unit (ALU), in the ASC this was simplified into a single 8-core processor feeding the ALU. The 4-core ALU/CPU was one of the first to include dedicated vector processing instructions, with the ability to send the same instruction to all four cores. This view is of a machine room with many of the systems electronic cabinets visible.