The search is on for a successor to Atlas, the computer which gave its name to the Science Research Council's chief computer laboratory. Atlas is almost ten years old now and obsolete. It is the first production model of Manchester University's famous prototype, which was taken out of service four months ago.
The SRC machine is still running smoothly, but its maintenance costs are rising yearly and spare parts will soon be unobtainable. Last year the maintenance bill was about £150,000, twice the sum needed to keep running the laboratory's new International Computers Limited ICL 1906A, which generates several times the computing power of Atlas.
The choice of a replacement for Atlas is complicated by the way in which the role of the Atlas laboratory is changing.
The laboratory was established originally to provide a source of computing power for universities which had insufficient of their own. The Computer Board has changed all that. In the past few years, most universities have bought computers of their own, and some, especially Manchester, have installed computing facilities many times more powerful than those available at Atlas.
The old Atlas will go out of service at the end of this year, and the laboratory's new 1906A will carry the chief computing burden until a new machine is chosen. Dr J. Howlett, director of the Atlas laboratory, said that in the future the laboratory would aim to provide special computing facilities, in addition to the sheer increase in computing power which would be obtained by purchasing a large, modern machine.
For this reason, it is unlikely that the laboratory will attempt to link a large computer to its present 1906A in the manner achieved at Manchester. It was more likely, Dr Howlett said. that the choice would be the £3.5 million Control Data Corporation Star, a new and very sophisticated machine which has unique capacity to solve problems in solid state physics. fluid flow and magnetohydrodynamics. The machine is very fast and can be used for vector processing.
There was no British computer at present with the same power, Dr Howlett said. Although he was anxious to buy British if possible, the British computer industry would have to get their advanced ideas off the drawing board and on the production line before a British replacement would be feasible.
The future role of the Atlas laboratory is further complicated by the present uncertainty about the organization of government research and development. There is no doubt that if SRC funds were diverted to government departments under Lord Rothschild's plan to sponsor customer-contractor research. the Atlas laboratory would be high on the list of SRC laboratories which might be asked to undertake services for the government.
Dr Howlett said he would be distressed if a significant proportion of the laboratory's effort was devoted to routine work for government departments. Although some measure of government control was a protection against science dilettantism, there was a need for freedom in research.
As well as the new ICL 1906A. the Atlas laboratory has a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP 15 computer and a VT10 display unit used for graphical display work.
Among the projects carried out on this equipment for the universities is a series of films made for the Open University. These have been constructed for the mathematics department, and have been used to teach calculus to first year students. The combination, Dr Howlett says of the processing power of the computer and the synoptic power of the human eye can lead to very exciting new developments in teaching.
With entry into the European Economic Community, Atlas could become the principal computer laboratory for the universities of Europe. There are, of course, computer laboratories in Europe comparable in power to Atlas, but these are mostly directed to specific objectives. The computer installation at CERN, the European nuclear research centre, for example, deals chiefly with computing contracts from experiments performed on the accelerators there. The nearest European equivalent to Atlas may be the computer laboratory at Darmstadt, Germany. But Atlas would have the edge in the provision of unique computing facilities, tailored specifically to the need of individual universities.
By the end of this year, London University should have more computing power reserved entirely for academic work than anywhere else in Europe. The Computer Centre in Guilford Street already possesses American Control Data Corporation 6600 and 6400 computers equal to about seven Atlases of computer power.
The Computer Board, who are responsible for financing the purchase and running costs of university computers. have recently agreed that these machines should be augmented by the installation of a CDC 7600 processor with 32K of small core memory and 256K of backing memory. The 7600 is widely regarded as the most powerful production computer in the world.
The power of the total complex will be 35-40 Atlases, on a par for example, with the computing arrangements at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) where only part of the power is available for academic work.
The decision to install the 7600 means that London has come into its own as a regional computing centre, one of three prescribed by the Computer Board. There was talk last year that London might have to take time on the Manchester complex (where the link-up of a 7600 with a British ICL 1906A should provide power equal to 25 Atlases) but now London will be the centre of a group of nine provincial universities to whom it will provide computing time.
The centre has terminals in 16 Colleges of London University, within a radius of 30 miles and one 400 miles away in Belfast University. With the arrival of the 7600, it will have to provide time in addition for the universities of Oxford, Surrey, Sussex, Kent, Southampton, City, Reading and Brunel.
Mr Neil Spoonley, the director, said that he was pleased the Computer Board had agreed to the extension but he was apprehensive about the load it would place on the staff and the machines. With a staff increased only marginally, he will be expected to find computing facilities for many more users.
The work load, Mr Spoonley said, would strain the guts of any computer system set up in London. The report of the computer centre shows that in 1970-71 it carried out well over half a million jobs but that, as a result of stringent cost reviews and some delays in the installation of equipment, the Computer Board allocation was underspent by almost £90,000.
Among the London colleges, Imperial was the heaviest user taking over 25 per cent of the total available computing time. It also took the highest number of units, a measure of the resources demanded by the job. Outside London, Queen's University, Belfast, took most time, followed by City University.
The centre has recently ordered £70,000 worth of microfilm display equipment which will make it possible to generate and record animated pictures using a cathode ray tube. One of the uses of this equipment is to record animated teaching films of the kind pioneered and used by the Open University to teach mathematics.
At present the OU's films are made by the Science Research Council's Atlas Computer Laboratory at Chilton, but Mr Spoonley clearly feels that ULCC should stake a strong claim on this field in the future.
Brian E. Cooper, of Larkhill, Wantage, has been awarded the degree of Doctor of Science by the University of London, for his work over the last ten years in the field of statistics and computing. He graduated from University College, London University in 1957 with a degree in statistics.
He is now senior consultant in statistics and data management with ICL Dataskil. His career in statistics and computing began at AERE Harwell, where he first came into close contact with the problems of the research scientist with experiments to design and data to analyse. After a sabbatical year in the United States which included eight months at Bell Telephone Laboratories and four months at the University of California, he returned to England to begin research work at the Atlas Computer Laboratory, Chilton.
Married With four sons, Stephen aged ten, Martin eight, Michael six, and Nicholas four, Brian Cooper and his wife Jill devote most of their spare time to music: they play the double bass and viola in local orchestras and Brian enjoys composing.
Concordance programs for various scripts including Persian, Arabic and Greek have been written at the Atlas Laboratory at Chilton by Mrs Susan Hockey.
Output from the programs is in the original script, with plotting positions in a 1024 × 1024 matrix used for each character, and is produced off-line on a Stromberg Datagraphics SC4020 microfilm plotter.
The two illustrations show the first law of Hammurabi in Akkadian (Babylonian) cuneiform and in Egyptian hieroglyphs a statement which roughly translated means The End.
ALL the signs are that Daresbury Nuclear Physics Laboratory, near Warrington, Lancs, is to be considerably upgraded as a scientific research centre.
Government approval has already been received for the installation of an IBM 370/165 to replace the existing 360/65, the Science Research Council have recommended siting a 20MV heavy ion electrostatic generator at Daresbury to be used by the Universities of Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham and more tentative plans are afoot to develop a 20GeV electron accelerator as well.
The experimental work now being carried out at the laboratory centres around the 5GeV NINA electron synchrotron which enables scientists to carry out some important work on the electroproduction and photoproduction of strongly interacting particles in the energy range 1GeV - 5GeV.
Apart from the staff of the laboratory itself, teams of scientists from the universities of Manchester, Lancaster, Glasgow and Sheffield and from Pisa in Italy are carrying out experimental work on the main NINA apparatus.
Although NINA and its German counterpart DESY in Hamburg are carrying out important work in particle physics, the most glamorous experiments are inevitably carried out on the giant 20GeV. linear machine at Stanford University, California, where an electron beam is accelerated along a tunnel several miles long before smashing into a target to probe the inner structure of the fundamental nuclear particles.
The computer installation at Daresbury centres around an IBM 360/65 with 1 Megabyte of fast core store and another half Megabyte of direct access store. An IBM 1802 concentrator handles input from on-line experiments and multiplexed terminals while two 2250 interactive graphics units are used in the study of beam optics.
With a large amount of its power dedicated to on-line working, the computer at Daresbury is really the engine-room of the laboratory and the new 370/165, which is said to be about three times more powerful than the current machine, will have most of its extra power taken up by increased rates of on-line data acquisition from existing experiments.
Operations at Daresbury have been somewhat restricted because the Science Research Council have been heavily committed to supporting the development of the 300GeV proton synchrotron at CERN, the European centre for fundamental research in Geneva, explains the laboratory's director, Professor A. Ashmore.
However extensions to Daresbury's experimental programme are now being planned and include investigations in atomic, molecular and solid-state structure using the strong electromagnetic radiation which is created by the electrons orbiting in the main accelerator.
Installation of equipment for handling this radiation is nearing completion and university scientists from Manchester, Reading, Oxford and Cambridge as well as staff from the National Physical Laboratory are preparing experiments which are expected to go into operation next year.
As well as providing computer services to the scientists from Daresbury and the various universities involved in the experimental work, staff of the laboratory's computing and electronics group also carry out systems development work, particularly in the area of interactive graphics and their application to the study of beam optics.
Another focal point of the software development work is the provision of Camac-type interfaces for data handling with various small peripheral computers. Camac controllers designed at Daresbury are in use at CERN and Liverpool and Manchester universities, the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in California and Canada's Alberta University.
In order to improve the job handling characteristics of the main computer, its OS software has been modified so that programs which might adversely affect the processing efficiency if they are loaded into the wrong areas of core are guided into the CPU under operator control.
As with most scientific research establishments, Daresbury frequently has had a large backlog of work-in-hand, but this situation will hopefully be alleviated with the installation of the large 370/165.
