IBM has now revealed a few more details of its second round of Supercomputing System Extensions for its ES/9000s fitted with Vector Facilities (CI No 1,555), and it turns out that the High Performance Parallel Interface-attached Disk Array Subsystem is an array of 5.25 drives – IBM has not said which of its disks it is using – connected to the host via an RS/6000 RISC Unix box used as the controller. The Parallel Interface is the 800Mbps 100 Megabytes per second – channel that was announced for Vector Facilitated mainframes in May last year, and make use of the Parallel Input-Output Access Method disk striping facility also announced at that time (CI No 1,187), which spreads logically contiguous data across several physical disks to speed access. The combination of the channel and the disk array will enable a data transfer rate of 50Mbytes-per-second, IBM claims. The new Supercomputing Visualisation Enhancement is also RISC-based and uses the fast channel to provide a high resolution image in about 10mS. IBM says that the new Extensions are really aimed at the next generation of supercomputing, implying that they will be part of IBM’s contribution to the machines that Steve Chen’s Supercomputer Systems Inc is developing in Eau Claire, Wisconsin – but are being made available to some customers with IBM’s present generation Vector Facility – not least so that IBM can see how they work in practice. All of which means that prices are very elastic and there is no price list.
