Digital Equipment Corp says it will speed up Memory Channel to a message latency of 3.5 microseconds soon – down from 5 microseconds now. It will push up the 100Mbps – 35Mbps point-to-point – bandwidth too. None of the enhancements is being returned to Encore Computer Corp, from which DEC licensed the interconnect. As for Scalable Coherent Interconnect NUMA implementations, DEC says their problem is they assume errors do not happen. And programming models must still understand the memory hierarchy in which instructions will be processed more quickly (even if only by a microsecond) by a CPU’s local memory than by a distributed processor. DEC says it will do real symmetric processing with no latency issues. TruCluster systems can be no more than a few yards apart right now – DEC is working on longer connections. Of its 45,000 clustering customers DEC says 2,000 are running its first-generation Unix clustering – Advantage-Cluster – the rest are VAXcluster installations. Oracle Cor p and DEC reckon they may have achieved 40,000 tpmC with a 133Gb database across four eight-way TurboLasers.
