Instead of waiting for production shipments of 64-bit PowerPC 620 and AIX technologies from IBM Corp, Compagnie des Machines Bull SA has decided to introduce its long-gestating four-way PegaKid board as a 32-bit PowerPC 604 device in a new range of ‘superserver’ building blocks due by the end of next quarter. Designed and prototyped to host the PowerPC 620, Bull still has hopes of pitching its PCI bus-based PegaKid board up against Intel Corp’s commodity four-way SHV motherboard. It will offer 620 versions later in the year. PegaKid embodies Bull’s PowerScale II symmetrical multi-processing 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 multi-processing servers. Bull envisages multiple PegaKid modules being connected into clustered superserver configurations for the enterprise, using its existing FDDI-based PowerCluster interconnect to get up to eight-ways. It says it doesn’t see much requirement for the full-duplex 2Gbps ISL Inter-Serial Link PowerCluster follow-on, which was supposed to have offered 16-way clustering to its existing PowerPC 604 Escala servers by the end of last year. But the company now appears to be putting together a ccNUMA strategy together with PowerPC partner IBM which will see the two buy and build ccNUMA-enabling technologies. Bull says it doesn’t see a requirement for general purpose NUMA systems developing until 1999, and isn’t saying when or how those technologies will be delivered.
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