London-based Parsys Ltd was perhaps justified in its annoyance at being shoved to the far right corner of the Supercomputing Europe ’92 exhibition hall at the CNIT trade centre, La Defense, Paris earlier this month. A small company, not scheduled to be profitable for another two years and currently turning over only UKP2.5m, Parsys needed the publicity, but of course it was the likes of Intel Corp and IBM Corp, with their big glitzy stands, that dominated the main isles while the lesser known but arguably more interesting companies found themselves tucked away at the back by the fire exits.
Ownership
Parsys Ltd spun off from Thorn EMI Plc two years ago (CI No 1,377), backed by venture capital company Electra Innvotec Ltd, which owns 52% of the company; Thorn EMI retained 33% and the management and staff own 15%. Parsys first began working with its now GP MIMD partner Telmat Informatique SA, of Soultz, France in 1985, initially under the auspices of Thorn EMI, building SuperNode parallel machines around the Transputer, to further the European chip’s acceptance. First prototypes of the SuperNode machine, based on the T800 Transputer, began appearing in 1988. Then, as Parsys flew the parental nest and began to market the SuperNode, Telmat SA’s Telmat Informatique started to push the machine itself, but badged as the Telmat T.Node and running Shepton Mallet, Somerset-based Perihelion Software Ltd’s Helios operating system (Parsys has its own Unix-like operating system, Idris, under which Oracle Parallel Server has now implemented). Telmat’s general manager, Jean Cholley, thinks in retrospect that this move – to go off and sell the SuperNode machine independently – was a mistake, the implication being that the T.Node did not make the company much money – the system accounts for only 10% of Telmat’s revenues, Telmat’s main business being in telecommunications measurement devices and, more recently, optical disk-based data storage management systems. It was 1989 when $25m-a-year Telmat, which employs 250 staff, met up again with Inmos Ltd and Parsys, and with Bristol-based Meiko Scientific and Aachen, Germany-based Parsytec GmbH, to work on the Esprit supercomputing project, which aims to build a general-purpose MIMD supercomputer around the T9000 Transputer, as well as a TeraFLOPS massively parallel supercomputer based on the 80860 and Sparc technology implemented in Concerto. The rules laid down on the table as plan GP MIMD, launched into action in January of last year, however, bound each of the participants to restrict the development of their own proprietary lines to simple upgrades to the T9000 Transputer when it becomes available. Parsytec, the fifth partner in the early stages of the project, refused to adhere to this group policy and went ahead with the development of its proprietary GC Series. For its greed and disregard of the common goal, Parsytec was asked to leave the GP MIMD project.
Sue Norris reports from Supercomputing Europe ’92 in Paris, where Parsys, Telmat and Meiko launched the first fruit of their Esprit GP MIMD parallel supercomputing effort.
Parsytec, somewhat bitter after the event, says the Esprit programme is losing its European flavour anyway – two of the three sub-projects being based on US chips, the Sun Sparc and Intel 80860 RISCs. Parsys’s Ian Coburn dismisses such gripes, noting that it’s only just been made public knowledge that the consortium would use the 80860 and Sparc chips. The Transputer is present in the newly-launched Concerto machines but, as reported (CI No 1,859), only for internal communications. The actual GP MIMD general-purpose machine, however, which is due to arrive in beta version by the end of the year, will use the T9000 Transputer as its main ingredient. Coburn explains that the Transputer’s merits are that it was designed fundamentally for massive parallelism, with its on-board RAM and message-passing capabilities, from which stem its ability to run commercial database code as well as scientific floating point code – the 80860 meanwhile is more or less restrict
ed to running scientific code. Though the Transputer has had a tough time trying to compete with its US counterparts, which have been readily justified and taken up by fund-rich research organisations able to place orders for proposed machines built from them, the UK chip does according to Coburn have potential with a growing on-chip RAM capacity (up to 64Mb with the next release) and a Unix-like operating system in the form of Parsys’s Idris – among others. Back on the new Concerto offering, it is the marketing of the system which is perhaps the most interesting issue, for it turns out that Meiko, Parsys and Telmat will each sell the machine, badged as their own product. This puts Meiko in rather a strong position, having a reasonable presence in the UK, and – with an operation in Waltham, Massachusetts – being in the best position to attack the US. Indeed, Meiko has been responsible for all the pre-launch shipments of Concerto machines – some five systems. Naturally, neither Parsys nor Telmat have seen, or are likely to see anything from these sales.
Spain
Parsys expects to make some sales in the UK, but will be looking to Spain for business, since this has now become Parsys’s strongest region outside the UK (CI No 1,842). Telmat will of course focus on France. For Telmat, having its corporate eggs in more than one basket, it was perhaps not such a sacrifice to give up its rights to build proprietary systems with the new T9000 Transputer but, as far as Parsys is concerned, it would seem that the company is risking its bread and butter in favour of a project which puts Meiko in the driving seat. One further point to note is that, outside their Esprit relationship, Parsys and Meiko are head-on competitors in the UK, particularly in the commercial parallel processing market, since both manufacturers offer the Oracle Parallel Server database system. But Coburn does not seem concerned. But then the GP MIMD programme is increasing Parsys’s visibility as a player in the market for massive parallelism. A full show report will appear in Computergram in a few day’s time – watch this space.
