Floating Point Systems Inc, the Beaverton, Oregon company that likes to call itself FPS Computing these days, has duly announced the first Sparc RISC-based supercomputers, and some high-performance servers. FPS believes that the five new members of its 500 Series could irrevocably change supercomputer marketing because of their built-in access to the thousands of Sparc programs already available. No other supercomputer can claim an application binary interface compatibility or the inherent scalability that FPS can, according to the company’s vice-president of new technology, Drew McCrocklin. Currently, other supercomputers from FPS competitors such as Convex Computer Corp are still basically proprietary, FPS argues, although based on Unix, and implementations of applications software such as a database cost as much as $1m, a cost that is passed along to the customer. With a Sparc-based engine, says senior product manager Carolyn McClain, it’s now simply a matter of buying a shrink-wrapped package. At the high end of FPS’s offering is the Sparc Supercomputer 500SA3 – FPS calls it an integrated heterogeneous supercomputer that modularly integrates dissimilar processor types – scalar, vector, parallel-matrix and application-specific co-processors. It is said to offer 2.24 GFLOPS performance, field upgradable to deliver 13.44 GFLOPS peak and capable of outperforming a Cray Y-MP/8. The Sparcsystem series 500SC1 processes scalar portions of applications on the one-to-eight Bipolar Integrated Technology Inc ECL Sparc chips running from 67 MIPS to 533 MIPS. In addition to symmetric multiprocessing, all or some of the processors can be applied to a single task, introducing fine-grain parallelism to the Sparc world for the first time. The company’s 500SD4 file server features multiple Sparc scalar processors doing over 267 MIPS, and offer 300Gb of disk storage with sustained transfer rates of 128Mb per second. The boxes run SunOS, which FPS has merged into its own Unix implementation, as well as Open Look and Open Network Computing. FPS and Sun have a more intimate relationship than most of Sun’s co-marketing partners and Sun is expected to bring FPS into customer sites that Sun’s own lower-end Sparc machines cannot yet address. Sun’s director of corporate technology marketing Bill Keating foresees the FPS 500 used much as a server networked – in a distributed computing fashion new to high-end scientific and engineering applications – to Sun Sparcstation graphics workstations doing pre-level price to half of what was originally anticipated it would be, has already pre-sold a number of machines to 10 customers including Canon, Telefunken, UCLA, the university of Namur and Veritas Seismic. A minimally configured 500 machine goes for $450,000, while a full-blown system will sell for around $4m.
