Data General Corp was in London last week hosting a NUMA 97 Non- Uniform Memory Architecture conference, trying to drum up interest in its Pentium Pro-based ccNUMA AViiON servers, now expected in March. The Westborough, Massachusetts-based company claims to have shipped two of the servers to partners, and will follow Sequent Computer Systems Inc’s lead by having several customer reference sites on stream by the time of the introduction. It won’t follow Sequent beyond 32-ways it says, because its own NUMA variant of the distributed shared memory concept which uses Dolphin Interconnect A/S Scalable Coherent Interface connection rings becomes overloaded. It’s possible to get around the problem by using switched-ring fabrics or a mesh interconnect, but then the costs get out of hand, Data General reckons.
á
