Another obscure design win for Digital Equipment Corp’s Alpha RISC has surfaced in the shape of Sandy, Utah-based parallel processing tools developer Alta Technology Corp, which has moved on to designing and building its own parallel machine, and has followed Cray Research Inc and Jacques Stern’s Stern Computing Systems SA in picking the Alpha for a parallel machine. Alta has launched the first members of what is to be a parallel computing. DEC is to supply Alpha microprocessors and workstation products to Alta for use in delivering a family of parallel, attached and embedded computing products. When it comes to such high-compute applications as real-time simulations and image processing, parallel architectures are the only affordable option, reckons Alta president Glen Lowry. The Alpha processor is an excellent chip for working in these real-world environments. DEC is initially supplying the Alpha 21064-200MHz, 21064A-275MHz and 21066-166MHz processors to Alta for its parallel and embedded systems and the company says it has completed initial development of several custom products using the 275MHz processor for OEM customers and will make its first shipments later this month, with commercial off-the-shelf shipments of products based on Alpha beginning in September. The first system-level products will be a family of personal supercomputers – an unfortunate name since it was used by one of the last round of supercomputer companies that failed to survive. The PS/Alpha/T-series are packaged systems to be supplied with up to 16 Alpha processors and 16Mb to 128Mb of memory per processor. The T-series systems are designed for very-high compute, low-bandwidth applications and use low-cost communications processors attached to the Alpha processor, but future Alta products are planned to expand the input-output performance for very high bandwidth applications using high-speed Asynchronous Transfer Mode and Fibre Channel technology. Pricing for a dual-processor PS/Alpha/T-series development system begins at $38,500 for two 275MHz Alpha processors in an external chassis and Alta’s EISA interface board, and an Alpha workstation with DEC’s C, C++ and Fortran tools and Alta’s parallel software extensions. Other host interface options are available. The first Board Level Product based on the Alpha is the Alta AT/V64, a 6U VME board with an Alpha 21064A-275MHz processor and 16Mb of 15nS cached memory, providing a sustained memory bandwidth of more than 400M-bytes per second. The AT/V64 attaches to iAPX-86 personal computers and NetWare networks, and DEC, Sun Microsystems Inc, Hewlett-Packard Co and IBM Corp workstations via EISA, AT, SCSI, SBus, and other computer interfaces provided by Alta. To augment the 21064A’s internal 16Kb data and 16Kb instruction caches, Alta’s AT/V64 external memory interface features a high performance, 128-bit wide path to a proprietary, cached memory architecture. It includes a programmable four-channel communications processor with 32Kb EEPROM, 16Kb of which can be prog rammed for user applicati ons. With a 16Mb 275MHz CPU it costs $8,900. Soft ware compiled on an Alpha workstation running OSF 1.3 or higher can be linked with parallel extensions for C, C++ and Fortran from Alta Software Libraries to run on AT/V64 processor nodes or Alta PS Systems.
