ISRA Parsytec products are primarily used for quality and surface inspection, particularly in the metal and paper industries.

Parsytec was founded in 1985 in Aachen, Germany, by Falk-Dietrich Kübler, Gerhard H. Peise, and Bernd Wolff, with an 800,000 DM grant from the Federal Ministry for Research and Technology (BMFT).

[3] Unlike SUPRENUM, Parsytec focused its systems, particularly in pattern recognition, on industrial applications such as surface inspection.

As a result, the company not only captured a significant market share in European academia but also attracted numerous industrial customers, including many outside Germany.

To allow Parsytec to focus on research and development, a separate entity, ParaCom, was established to handle sales and marketing operations.

[9] While Parsytec had a workforce of roughly 130 staff in the early 1990s, the ISRA VISION Group employed more than 500 people in 2012/2013.

Parsytec's product range included: In total, approximately 700 stand-alone systems (SC and GC) had been shipped.

Initially, Parsytec participated in the GPMIMD (General Purpose MIMD)[11] project under the umbrella of the ESPRIT program,[12] both of which were funded by the European Commission's Directorate for Science.

However, after significant disagreements with other participants—Meiko, Parsys, Inmos, and Telmat—regarding the choice of a common physical architecture, Parsytec left the project and announced its own T9000-based machine, the GC.

This led to the development of Parsytec's "hybrid" systems (e.g., GC/PP), where transputers were used as communication processors while the computational tasks were offloaded to the PowerPCs.

This is partly due to the architecture, but also because of the aforementioned unavailability of the Inmos T9000, which forced Parsytec to use the T805 and PowerPC processors instead.

A GigaCube (sometimes referred to as a supernode or meganode)[14] consisted of four clusters (nodes), each with 16 Inmos T805 transputers (30 MHz), RAM (up to 4 MB per T805), and an additional redundant T805 (the 17th processor).

[15] The unusual spelling of x'plorer led to variations like xPlorer, and the Gigacluster is sometimes referred to as the GigaCube or Grand Challenge.

Megaframe[16][17] was the product name for a family of transputer-based parallel processing modules,[18] some of which could be used to upgrade an IBM PC.

Additionally, cards for special features were offered, including a graphics processor with a resolution of 1280 x 1024 pixels and an I/O "cluster" with terminal and SCSI interfaces.

The Network Configuration Manager (NCM) software controlled the NCUs and dynamically established the required connections.

This was because, firstly, both transputers shared the same instruction set, and secondly, they had a similar performance ratio of compute power to communication throughput.

The network structure of the GC was a two-dimensional lattice, with an inter-communication speed between the nodes (i.e., clusters in Parsytec's terminology) of 20 Mbit/s.

The CC card rack subsystem provided the system with its infrastructure, including power supply and cooling.

Regarding the CCe, the software was based on IBM's AIX 4.1 UNIX operating system, along with Parsytec's parallel programming environment, Embedded PARIX (EPX).

A separate communication processor (T425) equipped with 4 MB of RAM[42] controlled the data flow in four directions to other modules in the system.

In addition, Parsytec provided a parallel programming environment called Embedded PARIX (EPX).

[40] To develop parallel applications using EPX, data streams and function tasks were allocated to a network of nodes.