Alliant Computer Systems Inc, Littleton, Massachusetts is looking to revive its fortunes after a string of loss-making quarters with the introduction today at Supercomputing ’91 of the Campus/800 massively parallel minisupercomputer. The Campus has been put together using clusters of its existing FX/2800 systems, using a total of up to 800 Intel Corp 80860 RISC CPUs. Alliant says the machine supports both distributed and shared memory – and the last enables the processor units to share data, making application development easier. The Campus/800 is rated at up to 32 GFLOPS and comes with 128Gb memory. An 800-CPU model is composed of 32 ClusterNodes, each running a copy of Unix across 25 80860s with 4Gb shared memory. The ClusterNodes which can be geographically located up to six miles apart preclude the necessity to front-end the Campus system with workstations, as they are, for all intents and purposes, FX/2800s. The machine includes a 32 by 32 HiPPI, a High Performance Parallel Processor Interface, from Network Systems Corp, and Alliant says that future enhancements might include a 64 by 64 implementation. Campus ships from the second quarter of next year and $1.5m will buy a two-cluster, 50-CPU system. After selling its Swiss subsidiary to UPT Performance back in July UPT handled sales to German speaking countries – Alliant is now withdrawing from direct sales in Europe and Japan. Futronic Inc, Espoo, Finland, is taking over the distribution channel in Scandinavia, Finland and the Baltic states, and CGI Computer General Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire, will handle sales to the UK, Benelux and France. Strangely enough, CGI has an agreement to distribute the rival Wavetracer Inc’s Zephyr, its new 4,000 or 8,000 processor massively parallel systems (CI No 1,802). Futronic and UPT have licensed the Alliant name, and Alliant says CGI is also in discussions about doing the same. Alliant hopes to break even this quarter, and expects to do $45m sales for the year.
