Kendall Square Research Corporation company information, Employees & Contact Information

Kendall Square Research (KSR) was a supercomputer company headquartered originally in Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1986, near Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It was co-founded by Steven Frank and Henry Burkhardt III, who had formerly helped found Data General and Encore Computer. KSR produced two models of supercomputer, the KSR1 and KSR2. The KSR systems ran a specially customized version of the OSF/1 operating system, a Unix variant, with programs compiled by a KSR-specific port of the Green Hills Software C and FORTRAN compilers. The architecture was shared memory implemented as a cache-only memory architecture or "COMA". Being all cache, memory dynamically migrated and replicated in a coherent manner based on the access pattern of individual processors. The processors were arranged in a hierarchy of rings, and the operating system mediated process migration and device access. Instruction decode was hardwired, and pipelining was used. Each KSR1 processor was a custom 64-bit reduced instruction set computing (RISC) CPU. Besides the traditional scientific applications, KSR with Oracle Corporation, addressed the massively parallel database market for commercial applications. The KSR-1 and -2 supported Micro Focus COBOL and C/C++ programming languages, and the Oracle PRDBMS and the MATISSE OODBMS from ADB, Inc. Their own product, the KSR Query Decomposer, complemented the functions of the Oracle product for SQL uses. The TUXEDO transaction monitor for OLTP was also provided. The KAP program (Kuck & Associate Preprocessor) provided for pre-processing for source code analysis and parallelization. The runtime environment was termed PRESTO, and was a POSIX compliant multithreading manager. In Q3 1994 the company was delisted from the stock exchange after a revenue recognition irregularities scandal. In went out of business after that, having sold patents and IP to SUN Mictosystems.