FPS Computing Inc, Beaverton, Oregon, is pinning most of its hopes on the 64-bit multiprocessor Unix technology it bought with the assets of Celerity Computing these days, and has now cast it as the FPS Model 500 Expandable System Architecture, which adds VectorPlus processing to the basic capability of the 500 processor. The Model 500EA is a 64-bit Unix mini-supercomputer that starts at $204,000 with typical configurations at $421,000, larger configurations up to $2.5m and ships have begun. In conjunction with a new FPS Fortran compiler and FPSMath library, performance of the 500EA is claimed to be 30% to 50% faster than the 500, and on some applications up to 2.5 times. The company also claims that it offers 2.5 times better price-performance than the C2 series from minisuper market leader Convex Computer Corp. New peripherals include a 200ips seismic tape subsystem and VME-based IBM 3480-compatible tape cartridge, and an new IPI-2 disk subsystem that provides 6Mbyte-per-sec ond data transfers, which can be striped for peak rates in excess of 20Mbytes-per-second, FPS claims. The company did not give prices.
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