A prototype of Hitachi Ltd’s Precision Architecture RISC parallel supercomputer – designed to accommodate up to 128 CPUs and go to 23 GFLOPS using a 100Mbps interconnect – will be up an running at the University of Tokyo within the next three months. Meanwhile, the scalable RISC server architecture Hitachi Ltd plans to construct around PowerPC RISCs following its recent agreement with IBM Corp could stretch right through the spectrum, from high-end systems with over 100 nodes, to small departmental servers. All design and development work is the responsibility of Hitachi Ltd in Tokyo – Hitachi Data Systems Ltd will decide which of these technologies it wants to sell on a worldwide basis. All the new system products conceived in Tokyo will run OSF/1 Unix. Hitachi, an acknowledged conservative industry force, admits it has been deliberately slow rolling out its Osiris open systems mainframe environment. It says it has got a whole bunch of new Osiris technologies up its sleeve, but is scared of frightening off its IBM Corp plug-compatible mainframe crowd by introducing them all at once. It says its six European and 15 worldwide Osiris customers put it right on target.
