Basingstoke, Hampshire-based Aptec Computer Systems Ltd, the UK subsidiary of US company Aptec Inc, has launched VSP-2, a board-level 150 MFLOPS vector and scalar processor for its proprietary IOC-100 and IOC-200 high-performance input-output computers. Aptec Inc is a private $20m-a-year company with 140 employees, which was established in 1981 in Portland, Oregon, to develop and market high-performance input-output computer systems suitable for data-intensive real-time applications requiring large throughput capabilities, such as large-scale simulations, massive database applications, image and signal processing, data acquisition, computational physics and chemistry and computer-aided design. The IOC, Aptec’s interconnection environment, manages data transfers between high-speed peripherals, networks and computers. The company’s first product, the IOC-24 computer, was shipped in 1983, followed by the IOC-100 and IOC-200, and Aptec now has 400 systems installed – 30 of these are in Europe, one or two in Australia and Japan, but the majority in the US. In 1988, Aptec added the VSP-1 circuit board to the IOC-24, which consists of a 20 MFLOPS vector processor, scalar processor, data formatter and on-board memories – all connected by a high-speed synchronous bus. Aptec has to date sold 200 of these boards to its existing IOC customers. The new VSP-2, for the IOC 100 and 200, is seven and a half times more powerful than its predecessor, yielding 150 MFLOPS. The 32-bit Australian floating point vector processor comprises six processing elements – four adders and two multipliers, yielding the 150 MFLOPS power rating. The scalar processor is a Motorola 68030 CPU together with a 68882 co-processor operating at 25MHz. The data formatter is controlled by the CPU and provides 50Mbps transfers between the on-card components and the IOC. The on-board memory comprises two separate components – 1Mb of static RAM connected to the CPU and the data formatter via an 88Mbps bus, and 4Mb static connected directly to the vector processor by a 400Mbps bus. Up to 10 VSP-2 cards can be housed in one IOC system – producing 1.5 GFLOPS peak – enabling computing power to be scaled to suit an application’s inputoutput volume. The VSP-2 will be available initially for Aptec’s Digital Equipment Corp VMS environments most current VSP installations are in DEC VAX environments – and will be available for Unix later in the year. Software development tools run on any VAX under VMS for the IOC-100/200. The VAX compiler is supplied by Greenhill Software Inc. On the subject of the proprietary nature of the company’s systems, European marketing manager Stephen Markham pointed out that the alternative – the Intel 80860 processor – is limited in its inputoutput capabilities, which restrict 80860-based computer systems to a third of the performance enabled by the IOC – also, he noted, it isn’t possible to install more than one or two 80860 processors in one system without clogging it up with data. And, since the IOC is aimed at specialised real-time laboratory applications where maximum performance is of ultimate importance, portability isn’t such an issue. The VSP-2 software, which comes bundled with the VSP-based computer, includes C and Fortran compilers for the scalar and control portion of the VSP, as well as Aptec development tools. Six orders have already been received for the VSP-2 board, three from Ferranti International Plc in Scotland, for European Fighter Aircraft real-time radar processing, and three from an Italian company for similar application. Aptec also markets FutureLink, a range of high-performance network file servers, which include fast disk and tapes for storage, standard interface connections and hierarchical storage management software – FutureLink is aimed at financial, engineering, manufacturing and scientific applications.
