FROSTBURG

FROSTBURG was a Connection Machine 5 (CM-5) massively parallel supercomputer used by the US National Security Agency (NSA) to perform mathematical calculations.

The CM-5 was built by the Thinking Machines Corporation, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at a cost of US$25 million.

[2] The system had a total of 500 billion 32-bit words (≈ 2 terabytes) of storage, 2.5 billion words (≈ 10 gigabytes) of memory, and could perform at a theoretical maximum 65.5 gigaFLOPS.

The operating system CMost was based on Unix, but optimized for parallel processing.

FROSTBURG is now on display at the National Cryptologic Museum.

FROSTBURG on display at the National Cryptologic Museum . The light panels were used to check the usage of the processing nodes, and to run diagnostics.