For those that have forgotten, IBM Corp’s parallel mainframe is in fact a Sysplex of up to eight nodes, each of which can be up to six processors running single image; the first offering will be a read-only database search system, and delivery appears to have slipped to the second half of next year; the usual crowd of software companies jumped up to say they would support the various incarnations of the machine – a CICS transaction co-processor and a full-blown MVS machine are in the plan, including BMC Software Inc, Candle Corp and Comshare Inc; IBM is initially talking about DB2 and IMS running on the search processor; the reannouncement of the Powerparallel system – IBM claims to have installed 70 of the things – appears to have been a red herring to prove it could do parallel stuff.