London-based Parsys Ltd, Meiko Scientific Ltd of Bristol and France’s Telmat Informatique SA, headquartered in Saultz, yesterday launched the first product to to emerge from the GP MIMD Esprit supercomputing initiative. As expected, Concerto was unveiled at the Supercomputing ’92 exhibition in Paris yesterday (CI No 1,812), and it is a distributed-memory supercomputer based on Sparc and Intel 80860 processors. The mid-range supercomputer achieves 60 MFLOPS per processor in double precision mode, 80 MFLOPS in single precision, it scales up to a 64-processor configuration, achieving some 1.29 GFLOPS, and each processor has 32Mb of memory. Concerto owes more to Meiko’s technology than the other two, presumably because of its experience of mixed 80860 and Sparc technology. The three collaborators claim that the machine has brought in $10m of orders from the US, Asia and Europe, and the client list includes rival Cray Research Inc, INRIA, the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment and Toyota Motor Co. Being Sparc-based, Concerto runs SunOS, and it supports low-level message-passing primitives including CS Tools from Meiko, NX/2 from Intel Corp, the PARMACS library and the new applications support interface from GP MIMD. The last enables applications to be written for both supercomputers and personal computers. Concerto uses some Transputer technology, but to link the processors to the disks rather than increased processing power. A four-node configuration comes in at $110,000 and the price goes up to around $1.3m for a high-end model. All three companies are shipping now, but the triumvirate seems unclear on how revenue will be split, and it’s worth noting that Meiko and Parsys are regarded as head-on competitors, except for this collaboration. Meiko assembles the machine in the UK and is likely to dominate US sales as well, Telmat will market in France, and Parsys will get Spain; each will badge the machine as their own. Meanwhile, two other strands of the GP MIMD initiative – the TeraFLOPS system and Transputer-based T9000 machine – are due to ship in the last quarter, as first implementation and prototype respectively. T9000 availability depends on a ready supply of the T9000 chip from Inmos Ltd, and further details are being kept under wraps for the present, except to confirm that the TFLOPS machine will not use the T9000 chip, and looks as if it will be an expanded version of Concerto.
