website/content/museum/convex-computer-corp-c3800.md

title, categories, types, origins, years, cpus, params

title	categories	types	origins	years	cpus	params
Convex Computer Corp. C3800	Computers	Professional Computer	U.S.A.	1991	2 to 8 processors	name image company company_name specs tabs forum_thread photos links oc_id source C3800 /media/museum/photos/convex_3800_system_s1.jpg /companies/convex-computer-corp Convex Computer Corp. label value NAME C3800 label value MANUFACTURER Convex Computer Corp. label value TYPE Professional Computer label value ORIGIN U.S.A. label value YEAR 1991 label value BUILT IN LANGUAGE None label value KEYBOARD Video terminal label value CPU 2 to 8 processors label value SPEED 240 Mflops to 2 Gflops label value RAM 512 MB to 4 GB label value TEXT MODES Depending on the video terminal used label value GRAPHIC MODES Ditto label value SIZE / WEIGHT 178 (H) x 201-328 (W) x 224 (D) cm / 1270 to 2631 kg label value I/O PORTS At least 8 x 80 Mbytes/sec PBUS slots, Integrated Disc Channel (IDC), Tape Library Interface (TLI) label value BUILT IN MEDIA From 34 GB hard disk label value OS Convex OS label value POWER SUPPLY Power consumption from 19.8 to 57.2 KVA - Forced air cooling label value PERIPHERALS Unknown label value PRICE Unknown photos links 957 title subtitle text image 3800 CONFIGURATIONS Taken from a Convex brochure /media/museum/photos/convex_3800_config_s1.jpg title url text ExConvex http://www.ex-convex.org/ Convex ex-employees mailing list (offline ?) 983 url date https://web.archive.org/web/20230608160752/http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=983 2023-06-08

The C3800 belonged to the C3 series which included the Convex C3200, C3400, C3800 scallable supercomputers. Scallable means that the computer power scales up with the number of installed processors and the amount of shared memory. Such systems were also made by IBM, Cray, HP.

The Convex 3800 used advanced technology gallium arsenide gate arrays. The Basic system held two processors, 512 Mbytes of RAM and 34 GB of disk capacity. It was air-cooled. Its higher speed was of 240 Mflops (Millions of floating-point operations per second) in 64-bit and 480 Mflops in 32-bit computations.
Fully configured with 8 processors and 4 gigabytes of RAM (pictured configuration), the monster could hit a speed of 2 gigaflops.

Such performance enabled scientists to study problems involving very high speed calculations and quantities of data that posed severe problems on smaller systems.
Convex computers were widely used for visualisation in computational fluid dynamics, medicine, computer-aided engineering, petroleum and seismic exploration, and finance.

The Convex OS was an Unix variant which managed the specific features of the beast: processor allocation, memory caching, storage capabilities, etc. Major language compilers were C, Ada and Fortran.

Thanks to Mattias Persson who provided us with the Convex brochures.

We need more info about this computer ! If you designed, used, or have more info about this system, please send us pictures or anything you might find useful.