IBM Corp has struck up some strange alliances, but none as bizarre as the deal reportedly cooking in Tokyo, where the New York Times quotes IBM Japan Ltd officials as saying that a deal is near with NEC Corp under which the two would team to offer combinations of IBM’s mainframes with NEC’s SX-3 supercomputers. The reason that the idea has little technical logic is that the Japanese supercomputer manufacturers have all derived their machines from their top-end mainframes, which means that while the Hitachi Ltd and Fujitsu Ltd supers are more or less IBM-compatible, the only machines with which the SX-3 has any commonality are the Bull SA GCOS 8 mainframes. However IBM would no doubt find any alliance with Fujitsu or Hitachi politically unacceptable. A further eyebrow-raiser is that such a move will raise serious question marks over the machine being developed by Steve Chen’s Supercomputer Systems Inc, an effort that is being bankrolled by IBM, although IBM is quick to assert that such a reaction would not be justified. Any agreement would initially be confined to Japan, but could extend later to other parts of the world, although such a move would cause an outcry in Washington.
