Digital Equipment Corp has now confirmed that its entry into the massively parallel processing business will be by way of a joint venture with Maspar Computer Corp, founded in Sunnyvale by DEC refugees who retain close ties with their alma mater, and is also looking to bring together a consortium of vendors of massively parallel systems including Maspar, another of its partners, Thinking Machines Corp, and Intel Corp with its iPSC machines, to create a common programming environment to make applications portable between parallel systems. According to the New York Times, the announcement will be made within two weeks. The Maspar parallel machines use from 1,000 to 14,000 simple processors and are designed to be front-ended by DEC machines. DEC has formed a new Massively Parallel Systems Group under Charlie Wilson, who says that the announcement, of Maspar machines running DEC-developed software – specifically parallel compilers and other development tools, will include MIPS Computer Systems Inc RISC-based DECstations running under Ultrix as the front end processors. The massively parallel market for 1990 is put at $183m, but DEC sees it growing rapidly.
