Multiflow Computer, Inc., founded in April, 1984 near New Haven, Connecticut, USA, was a manufacturer and seller of minisupercomputer hardware and software embodying the VLIW design style.
Multiflow, incorporated in Delaware, ended operations in March, 1990, after selling about 125 VLIW minisupercomputers in the United States, Europe, and Japan.
Along with Cydrome, an attached-VLIW minisupercomputer company that had less commercial success, Multiflow demonstrated that the VLIW design style was practical, a conclusion surprising to many.
Trace scheduling, unlike any prior compiler technique, exposed significant quantities of instruction-level parallelism (ILP) in ordinary computer programs, without laborious hand coding.
VLIW was put forward by Fisher as a way to build general-purpose instruction-level parallel processors exploiting ILP to a degree that would have been impractical using what would later be called superscalar control hardware.
While there had previously been processors that achieved significant amounts of ILP, they had all relied upon code laboriously hand-parallelized by the user, or upon library routines, and thus were not general-purpose computers and did not fit the VLIW paradigm.
Encouraged by their compiling progress, Fisher's group started an architecture and hardware design effort called the ELI (Enormously Long Instructions) Project.
Multiflow delivered its first working VLIW minisupercomputers in early 1987 to three beta-sites: Grumman Aircraft, Sikorsky Helicopter, and the Supercomputer Research Center.
All the processors were built using CMOS gate arrays for the integer ALUs and registers, 3rd-party floating point chips, and medium-scale integrated circuits for the control and other portions.
It has been reported that this included Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Digital Equipment Corporation, Fujitsu, Hughes, HAL Computer Systems, and Silicon Graphics.
While a few of Multiflow's sales went to organizations wishing to learn more about the new VLIW design style, most systems were used for simulation in product development environments: mechanical, aerodynamic, defense, crash dynamics, chemical, and some electronic.
In 1987, GEI Rechnersysteme GmbH, a division of Daimler-Benz, began distributing Traces in Germany with great success, despite fierce competition from other minisupercomputer companies.
At that point, the board determined that the prospects for successful additional financing, in the amounts necessary to bring Multiflow to maturity, were too unlikely to justify the company's continuation.
Despite that, even though none of the employees (besides Eckdahl) had ever held senior engineering positions, Trace systems and their software were delivered on time, were robust, and exceeded their promised performance.
The only nontechnical person in the core group, hired out of business school, went on to lead corporate development at a major research lab.
As Multiflow grew, it continued the tradition of hiring highly talented people: as one example, the documentation writer became one of the most influential editors in computer publishing.