Matsushita Electric Industrial Co has finally come down to the wire with that parallel supercomputer that it has been developing with Kyoto University, and says that the first model will ship at the end of the year and will cost about $1m. Called the Adena 256, the supercomputer integrates 256 64-bit floating point processors and Matsushita rates it at 2.6 GFLOPS. However, parallel GigaFLOPS are not really comparable with those delivered by machines from the likes of Cray Research Inc, because to achieve the performance, you have to be able to write your applications in such a way that all the central processing units go bang at the same time, and that is extremely tricky. Matsushita plans to follow the Adena 256 up with the Ohm256, which will also have 256 processors, but these processors will be rather faster ones capable of delivering 25 GFLOPS at peak. The Ohm256 will sell for around $2m; it is expected that Matsushita will link four of these machines together to create an Ohm1024 and claim 100 GFLOPS performance. There had been some speculation that Matsushita might have been using Inmos Transputers in the machines, because it markets the part in Japan, but the company told us in February last year that the 64-bit processing element is a newly-developed 440,000 transistor circuit which it has been developing with Kyoto University (CI No 1,115). Adena apparently stands for Alternating Direction Edition Nexus Array, which no doubt sounds much better in Japanese.
