The BESM-6 was the most well-known and influential model of the series designed at the
Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Engineering. The design was completed in 1965. Production started in 1968 and continued for the following 19 years. Like its BESM-3 and BESM-4 predecessors, the original BESM-6 was
transistor-based (however, the version used in the 1980s as a component of the
Elbrus supercomputer was built with
integrated circuits). The machine's
48-bit processor ran at 10 MHz clock speed and featured two
instruction pipelines, separate for the control and
arithmetic units, and a
data cache of sixteen 48-bit words. The system achieved a performance of 1
MIPS. The
CDC 6600, a common Western supercomputer when the BESM-6 was released, achieved about 2 MIPS. The system memory was
word-addressable using 15-bit addresses. The maximum addressable memory space was thus 32K words (192
K bytes). A
virtual memory system allowed to expand this up to 128K words (768
K bytes). The BESM-6 was widely used in
USSR in the 1970s for various computation and control tasks. During the 1975
Apollo–Soyuz Test Project the processing of the space mission
telemetry data was accomplished by a new computer complex which was based on a BESM-6. The Apollo-Soyuz mission's data processing by Soviet scientists finished half an hour earlier than their American colleagues from
NASA. A total of 355 of these machines were built. Production ended in 1987. As the first Soviet computer with an installed base that was large for the time, the BESM-6 gathered a dedicated developer community. Over the years several
operating systems and
compilers for
programming languages such as
Fortran,
ALGOL and
Pascal were developed. A modification of the BESM-6 based on integrated circuits, with 2-3 times higher performance than the original machine, was produced in the 1980s under the name Elbrus-1K2 as a component of the
Elbrus supercomputer. In 1992, one of the last surviving BESM-6 machines was purchased by the
Science Museum in
London, England. ==Peripherals==