The agreement that sees the KSR-1 machines made by massively parallel processing pioneer Kendall Square Research Inc, Waltham, Massachusetts marketed in Japan by Canon Inc’s Canon Software found founder and chief executive Henry Burkhardt III and chief operating officer Ray Fortune in Japan for the announcement and told Computergram that they hoped Japan would become their second largest market after the US. Currently that position is held by the European market where last year Kendall Square won 44% of its worldwide revenue, thanks to the distribution arrangement with Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG. 1992 was a year of expansion of the company: a public offering raised a $40m war-chest to build manufacturing and support organisations, the customer base grew to 22, and offices worldwide to 15. 1993 is the year of distribution agreements and expansion beyond the traditional scientific fields which have been the province of the massively parallel systems, into industrial and commercial markets. Kendall Square claims it has designed the only massively parallel architecture computer with shared memory and true scalability over all areas of the computer – processor, memory and input-output capability. The patented AllCache memory management technique enables all processor elements to act as cache memory; to implement this a 64-bit CMOS processor is used – the wafers are manufactured in Japan by Sharp Corp, a company with which Kendall Square has a very productive relationship said Burkhardt, and whose automated tape bonding system has made the manufacturing possible. In addition, the fact that the KSR1 operating system – based on OSF/1 – provides a compatible environment with standard open system products and tools available, gives Kendall Square an enormous advantage compared with other parallel computer companies, where the parallelism has to be handled in software – of which there is little available. In the Kendall Square case, for example with Oracle7, the parallelism is handled automatically so that execution runs in multiple processors at once – there is however a special query decomposer interface which breaks up complex SQL queries to enable them to run in parallel. Why Canon Software? Parent company Canon might have been wary of a tie-up with another US start-up after the NeXT Computer Inc swallowed $100m of Canon’s cash in what became a debacle for the Japanese firm, but it apparently felt that Kendall Square’s technology was a good fit with the Canon group’s other systems integration distributorships. Over the last few years, Canon has signed agreements with Digital Equipment Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co and Cray Research Inc, as well as being the major distributor of Apple Computer Inc’s Macintosh, and has bought out the Japanese subsidiary of Floating Point Systems Inc and incorporated it as Canon SuperComputing SI. The Kendall Square machine will be sold under the Kendall Square name. Video on demand According to Burkhardt, Canon also provided the mix of technical and commercial contacts, the latter markets being where Kendall Square plans to expand. Canon was also a relatively neutral partner, being neither a trading company nor an existing manufacturer. Also in the longer term Burkhardt sees possible synergies between massively parallel systems and the multimedia technologies which are Canon’s speciality. An example are the back-end machines that are needed to drive the video-on-demand systems, and where significant memory and input-output capacity would be required. Kendall Square plans to drive the relationship for the next six months, providing Canon with visiting experts and resources to enable them to learn the technologies for support purposes. Cray Research has made much of its problems in trying to sell Cray machines to government institutions in Japan and last year challenged the Ministry of Education over a decision to purchase a Japanese supercomputer rather than a Cray for Tohoku University. Some 25% of Kendall Square’s users too are government users in fields such as weather forecast
ing, solid state physics and biological and molecular studies, but Burkhardt, while keeping a close eye on the US government actions, and admitting that his opinion was solicited by Mickey Kantor, is reluctant to predict that Kendall Square could face similar issues. – Anita Byrnes
