Data General Corp appears to have stolen something of a march on its cache coherent-Non Uniform Memory Architecture (cc-NUMA) rivals. First, DG is to be Santa Cruz Operation Inc’s first port of call for ccNUMA support in Gemini, the second quarter merged UnixWare/OpenServer Unix. Second, DG’s won ICL Plc as the first OEM customer for its ccNUMA technology that links
four-way Intel Corp Pentium Pro SHV boards in distributed shared memory configurations. DG’s so pleased it’s turned the technology out into a new business unit called NumaLiine a la its Clariion RAID division. VP Phil Gerskovich is charged with winning other OEMs and creating distribution interest. ICL likes DG’s ccNUMA approach because it says it’s the simplest way of linking SHV boards. ICL claims the NUMA-based versions of its own systems that it will ship in the middle of next year will be the first UnixWare/ccNUMA systems on the market. Meantime DG’s said to be working to a schedule that’ll have its own DG-UX-based ccNUMA interconnect shipping before Sequent Computer Systems Inc delivers its NUMA-Q variant on December 3. SCO says it isn’t like Gemini won’t support other ccNUMA flavors, it’s just that others are more difficult to work in. In descending order of difficulty, they are Dolphin Interconnect A/S’ SCI, Tandem Computers Inc’s ServerNet and Sequent NUMA-Q. SCO’s aim is to make ccNUMA transparent to symmetric multiprocessing applications. To achieve it the operating system scheduler has to be re-fashioned to understand where necessary processes must be re-run on local boards rather than remote nodes to avoid latencies. It must also be able to schedule processes that are dependent on each other to run close by, SCO advises. As far as its concerned, clustering over LANs will be just as important. It’s just a different type of interconnect to support. SCO believes NUMA will apply best to OLTP environments and that decision support and prediction-type work is better suited to SMP. SCO will announce support for clustering via Oracle Parallel server in September.
Bi-lateral
Data General Corp and ICL Plc have, as expected, joined SCO’s 64-bit Unix development club. There’s claimed to be one other partner still under wraps. We don’t know how much any of them pay but SCO says it’s according to what they contribute and what they want out. The relationships are with SCO only. No other firms will join SCO’s 3DA Summit architecture axis with Hewlett-Packard Co. However both SCO and HP are likely to enter other bi-lateral relationships; that will be the path to get other technologies into 3DA where required. SCO also expects some NEC stuff to make it over the wall without a new agreement because of NEC’s close ties to HP in Japan where it sells HP kit.
