FROSTBURG was a Connection Machine 5 (CM-5) massively parallel supercomputer used by the US National Security Agency (NSA) to perform mathematical calculations. The CM-5 was built by the Thinking Machines Corporation, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at a cost of US$25 million. The system was installed at NSA in 1991, and operated until 1997.[1] It was the first massively parallel processing computer bought by NSA, originally containing 256 processing nodes. The system was upgraded in 1993 with another 256 nodes, for a total of 512 nodes.[2] The system had a total of 500 billion 32-bit words (≈ 2 terabytes) of storage, 2.5 billion words (≈ 10 gigabytes) of memory, and could perform at a theoretical maximum 65.5 gigaFLOPS. The operating system CMost was based on Unix, but optimized for parallel processing.
FROSTBURG is now on display at the National Cryptologic Museum.[3]