Compagnie des Machines Bull SA’s development team working on the symmetric multiprocessing version of IBM Corp’s PowerPC-based RS/6000, has completed the design and tested it last Friday, says Armand Malka, Bull vice-president of marketing. We ran the 601 B-processor with AIX 3.0, to which we had to add some extra functionality. We are still waiting for AIX 4.0 from IBM, which we need for definitive testing, but I believe IBM is ready to put major resources into that and certainly by spring 1994, [the final product] will be there, he said. AIX SMP is being developed by Bull’s teams in Grenoble and Milan, allied with a joint team in Austin, Texas. In Austin they are working on AIX 4.0 and ASICs for communication, but the really big work is going on in Europe, Malka said. We are extremely optimistic and I am taking into account the potential introductions of the likes of Hewlett-Packard Co and Sun Microsystems Inc. We have spent lots of money on this project and the new DPX/20 will cause a rupture in the market. Bull is also talking to IBM about joining its parallel processing projects because it has work that could be added to the software environment.
