Digital Equipment Corp and Cray Research Inc duly announced their VAX Supercomputer Gateway after we closed for press Wednesday: the Gateway is the first product offered under a new agreement for joint development and marketing of products that link DEC VAX systems to Cray supercomputers (CI No 688). The gateway, designed to link a Cray X-MP into a VAX-luster system, is based on VAX Bus Interface (BI) technology. According to the companies, it increases data throughput up to five times over various connection offerings from third parties; memory to memory transfer is put at 3Mbytes per second. The VAX Supercomputer Gateway is made up of a VAX 8250 processor, 20Mb of memory expandable to 32Mb, a 70Mbits per second VAXcluster interconnect, a 10Mbps Ethernet interconnect, a VAX/VMS licence, a Cray input-output adaptor, and DECnet network software. This package starts at $180,000, with first deliveries slated for this summer. In addition, Cray Station Software, costing $2,500 a month, is required to run the system; it allows remote users to send a batch job to the Cray input queue automatically and retrieve output later. Under the new development and marketing agreement, both companies will co-operatively develop hardware and software for customers who need both supercomputing and interactive computing capabilities. As examples of such users, a DEC spokesman cited scientists involved in molecular modelling, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, complex seismic and geological modelling, and and VLSI circuit design. Under the venture, DEC will sell the VAX Supercomputer Gateway, VAX/VMS software, and related network products, while Cray Research will sell the Cray Station software, supercomputer, and related network products, Each company will service their own systems. A Cray spokesman at the New York debut of the gateway commented that the agreement with DEC is non-exclusive and does not necessarily preclude a similar one with IBM.
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