Much of IBM’s Unix systems development work has been done in partnership with Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and the latest fruit of the effort is an experimental multiprocessor parallel workstation described as a step on the way to a personal supercomputer. The work station, which runs under Carnegie-Mellon’s Mach skinny multiprocessor Unix kernel, has been demonstrated transforming object det ails and shapes, colours and reflections into complex graphics, running codes for fluid dynamics and simulating annealing – modelling computer circuitry to minimise the distance traveled by the signal, as well as finite element analysis. The IBM scientists who designed the machine also plan to try it out on matching DNA pieces and understanding their interaction and ex ploring parallelism in transaction process ing, semantics and lexicography. The comp uter contains eight 25 MIPS RISCs, each with 8Mb memory, and 80Mb of common memory. The file system and all input-output opera tions are handled by a host RT Unix box.
