Although the Cambridge-based Bolt, Beranek & Newman Inc scrapped development of the next generation Butterfly machine and closed down its BBN Advanced Computers unit way back in 1991, it has kept faith with users of the massively parallel 88000 RISC-based machines, and has come up with an upgrade board to turn TC2000 machines into TC2001s and add enhanced real-time working: the board uses two PowerPC 604 processors, and upgrading is a board swap-out. The Butterfly TC2001 enables the user to work in the Unix development environment in one cluster of the machine, while running real-time applications concurrently in another cluster within the same machine. The new Butterfly has twice the switch capacity of its predecessor, and a 64-processor machine has over 7Gb of shared memory and aggregate input-output and memory bandwidth of 2.2G-bytes per second. The new system will be in beta test in June and will be available for general shipment in September, the firm said.
