Minisupercomputer manufacturer Alliant Computer Inc of Littleton, Massachusetts is to set up direct sales and support offices in Europe and Japan, following a major restructuring of its OEM deal with Apollo Computer. The company has already tapped John Harte from Floating Point Systems to be its president of European operations, and aims to have its European office open by January 1 next year. Apollo has been looking to broaden its choice of compute servers for distributed networks, resulting in the signing of a non-exclusive agreement with Multiflow Computer Inc of Branford, Connecticut. Alliant signed a $35m three year pact with Apollo at the end of 1985 which made Apollo sole distributor of Alliant’s FX parallel processors in Europe and the Far East, where they were sold as Apollo DSP 9000 compute servers. Sales, however, have not been spectacular, and in an effort to increase its share of the international market, currently 20% of the installed base of 142 systems, Alliant will now deal direct with customers in France, Germany, the UK, Italy, and Japan, as well as establishing a direct service operation for Europe in Bracknell, Berkshire. Apollo will continue to sell and support Alliant products, but under the Alliant name, in the rest of Europe, China, the Far East and Australia. The move, according to Alliant, was seen as inevitable by the both parties, and will be followed by further announcements concerning other countries next year. Alliant is happy with its initial establishment on the international market, but wants to increase the percentage of international business to around half of all sales. Communications tools now include high performance connection with Cray supercomputers through Hyperchannel, and support for DECnet and Network File System, as well as Apollo’s Network Computing System. Meanwhile, Apollo has signed an agreement with Alliant competitor Multiflow Computer Inc for joint marketing of Multiflow’s Trace supercomputers as compute servers on Apollo networks, particularly for design engineers, where software has been specifically optimised to run under Apollo’s Network Computing System. The agreement involves co-operation in marketing and training. Multiflow systems use Very Long Word Architecture and Trace Scheduling, which compiles operations for simultaneous execution into very long instruction words from Fortran and C programs.
