It is understood Data General Corp and ICL Plc will stand up over the next couple of weeks and declare themselves official development partners in Santa Cruz Operation Inc and Hewlett-Packard Co’s 64-bit Unix initiative. They join NEC Corp and TriTe al Corp as the only two publicly-declared development partners to date. Meantime the Non-Uniform Memory Architecture vendors’ squabble over how Santa Cruz will support shared memory architectures in its next-generation Unix boils down to money, and how a planned Non-Uniform Memory Architecture application programming interface layer for the operating system set gets skewed toward any particular implementation (CI No 2,856). It is important because Sequent Computer Systems Inc’s ccNUMA-Q data pump technology is said to require major and expensive motherboard changes. The further Sequent could persuade Santa Cruz to skew a Non-Uniform Memory Architecture programming interface towards NUMA-Q, the less those changes would be felt in users’ a nd independent software vendors’ bill-folds. Similarly two of Santa Cruz’s four Non-Uniform Memory Architecture partners, including Data General, use proprietary boards rather than Scalable Coherent Interface-on-PCI board implementations to achieve shared memory. Santa Cruz believes it is quite possible to support multiple NUMA-Scalable Cohernet Interface implementations, connectors, fail-over and other clustering techniques in an application programming interface layer like those implemented in other operating systems for device drivers. Besides Data General and Sequent, its other Non-Uniform Memory Architecture partners are Dolphin Interconnect Solutions A/S and Tandem Computers Inc. Santa Cruz says that the application prog-ramming inter-face layer will reflect generic shared memory technology support rather than a particular optimization, even if it has to give up some small amount of performance as a result of going for the common denominator. It could even include support for the shared-nothing arrangements more favored in one- to four-way systems, although that is yet to be decided. Santa Cruz says that scaling and cost will be the key concern of ccNUMA consumers.
