on the compiler won the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award in 1985. Encouraged by their compiling progress, Fisher's group started an architecture and hardware design effort called the ELI (Enormously Long Instructions) Project. Business beginnings ELI, which was to have 512-bit instruction words and initiate 10-30 RISC operations per cycle, was never built. Instead, Fisher, Ruttenberg, and John O'Donnell, who had led the ELI hardware project, started Multiflow in 1984 after failing to interest any mainstream computer companies in partnering in the ELI project. Originally, Multiflow was to have become a division of the workstation company Apollo Computer, but eventually it sought venture capital funding, closing its first round of financing in January, 1985, when the company already had about 20 employees. Donald E. Eckdahl, a former head of the NCR computer division, joined the company in 1985 as its CEO. Multiflow delivered its first working VLIW minisupercomputers in early 1987 to three beta-sites: Grumman Aircraft, Sikorsky Helicopter, and the Supercomputer Research Center. A Trace 14/200 was demonstrated to the public at a supercomputing conference in May, 1987, in Santa Clara, California. Technology Innovative architecture Multiflow's first computers were called the Trace 7/200 and Trace 14/200. The 7/ in the computer model number signified that the processor could initiate seven operations each cycle, using a 256-bit long instruction composed of 7 32-bit operations and a 32-bit utility field. The 7 operations were 4 integer/memory, 2 floating, and a branch. The 14/ models had twice as many of each instruction, and thus 512-bit long instruction words. Like many scientific-oriented processors of its day, the Trace had no traditional cache memory. Multiflow also announced a 28/ model at the outset, and eventually these were built and sold to a few customers. The 28/ had 1024-bit instruction words. Having ordinary programs compiled for computers like these was unquestionably revolutionary, as no earlier computer had offered compiled ILP even like that of the 7/ models. The 28/ systems pushed these limits far beyond either academic or industrial conception. While only a few customer programs contained enough ILP to keep a 28/ busy, when they did the performance was remarkable, since the processor would then initiate close to all 28 operations on average. Hardware Each 7/ processor datapath comprised a control unit board, an integer ALU board, and a floating point board. The 14/ added a second integer ALU board and a second floating point board.