Digital Equipment Corp has now formally announced its entry into the massively parallel computer systems business in partnership with MasPar Computer Corp of Sunnyvale, and revealed that it is taking an undisclosed minority stake in the company, said to be between $5m and $10m in the company that did $8m in sales last year. Under the agreement, DEC will market MasPar computers worldwide and MasPar will pay DEC licence fees for some of its patented technology used in the MasPar computers – the machines are controlled by DEC’s Ultrix Unix. DEC’s new Massively Parallel Systems Group will also acquire licences from MasPar for its unique programming environment software. Maspar’s machine uses a single instruction multiple data or data parallelism approach with a simple custom CPU chip with 64-bit architecture, of which it currently uses only four bits. Its MP-1 line comes with from 1,024 to 16,384 processors with performance up to 26 GIPS, 1.3 GFLOPS. DEC will make specific product announcements in a few weeks. It has dropped its own massively parallel computer development effort.
