Control Data Corp’s ETA Systems is due to announce tomorrow that fully-compatible Unix System V will be available for the ETA-10 family of scientific supercomputers from October – and sees it as a key plus in the battle with Cray Research Inc, because it believes that Cray’s Unicos will not pass the System V validation suite. The Control Data Corp subsidiary got another fillip last week when the ETA-10 at the John von Neumann National Computer Center at Plainsboro, New Jersey was clocked at 3 GFLOPS in four processor configuration. ETA Systems reckons that with the full complement of eight processors, the machine will be three times as fast and score a peak 9 GFLOPS, in sight of the 10 GFLOPS it was targeting in designing the ETA-10. ETA told the Newsbytes wire that enhancements done at the von Neumann lab, run by the Consortium for Scientific Computing joint venture of 13 universities formed to share the cost of making more powerful supercomputers, make the machine as fast as the new, soon-to-be shipped Cray Y-MP scientific supercomputer. Until Unix goes on general release, the operating system with the ETA-10 machines is the proprietary EOS.
