Compagnie des Machines Bull SA will use in-house and Dolphin Interconnect Solutions Inc technologies to configure its four-way Pegakid PowerPC boards into ccNUMA distributed shared memory servers running AIX. Bull’s using Dolphin’s Scalable Coherent Interface transportation chip plus its own protocol chip on boards that will link PowerPC boards into what it describes as large SMP severs running a single instance of IBM Corp’s Unix. It thinks its Level 3 cache technology plus 1.4Gbps duplex dual-ring transport plus its own non-SCI protocol cache coherency work will reduce latencies to a tiny number – but a speedbump nevertheless. It will incorporate a switch above and beyond the multiplexor it will introduce initially when customers start to build very large ccNUMA systems, presumably enhanced versions of the 12-way Polykid SMP servers Bull is supposed to introduce later this year. It will cluster the ccNUMA servers using its exiting FDDI PowerCluster interconnect, not Dolphin’s work. Bull emphasizes the need to use tried and tested high-availability clustering to protect against node failure but fully expects ccNUMA and clustering architectures to be integrated over the next two or three years. PegaKid embodies Bull’s PowerScale II SMP architecture, a more aggressive implementation of the original Micro Channel Architecture PowerScale design used by the Pegasus project which spawned its mid-range Escala server lines and IBM’s RS/6000 SMP servers. Bull and IBM recently extended their OEM through 2002 to cover a new generation of SMP technology Bull calls Polykid, for connecting multiple PegaKid modules.
