The Distributed Computing Solutions division of General Atomics Inc, San Diego, has licensed its UniTree file and storage management software to FPS Computing, as Floating Point Systems Inc likes to be known these days, for use on the Beaverton, Oregon company’s Model 500 family of minisupercomputers. The Model 500 family started out as the 64-bit machines that had been in development at Celerity Computing when FPS bought the assets of the San Diego company, but now consists of Sparc-based models. UniTree is a Unix-based hierarchical file and storage management system for networked, multivendor computing environments and is the fruits of a 10-year development programme at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California. It is designed for managing large volumes of data in high-performance computing applications, and when installed on a supported system and configured with appropriate storage peripherals, it is claimed to provide the user with apparently unlimited on-line storage capacity by automatically and invisibly migrating files among peripheral devices to reduce on-line storage in favour of less expensive off-line media. Any client system that supports Network File System or File Transfer Protocol and provides a network interface to Ethernet, FDDI, HIPPI High-Performance Parallel Interface, Hyperchannel or UltraNet can be used to access to a UniTree central file server. FPS Computing is integrating UniTree into its new Data Management & Automated Storage Strategy, claimed to be the first integrated system for minisupercomputers that provides the information management capabilities necessary for high-end supercomputing.
