ICL Plc is hoping to bring parallel processing into the mainstream sometime in 1994 with the launch of a relational database engine for commercial transaction processing that can scale up to 256 superscalar Sparc RISC chips, today’s issue of Unigram.X reports. The parallel system, now in prototype, will run the Chorus/mix microkernel version of Unix System V.4 from Chorus Systemes SA, Paris. The kernel was designed from the outset to support distributed shared memory and Multiple Instruction Multiple Data parallel architectures. ICL’s parallel engine turn into a product work that has been going on since 1989 under the European Community Esprit II European Declarative System project. Groupe Bull SA, Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG and ICL – plus associates – participated in the research effort, which was backed by ?20.5m of Community money and is now reaching its conclusion. ICL intends to optimise the server to run corporate relational databases at the high end of the commercial market, and enable it to link into an organisation’s existing systems, including mainframes, which could be used as clients. The ICL machine will use up to 128 pairs of superscalar Sparc RISC chips – one CPU for the application, the other to drive the network – each with 64Mb memory. Key to the architecture is an ICL-designed high-speed interconnect link for the processors, which will enable database queries to be spread over multiple CPUs and data to cover multiple file systems. ICL’s Corporate Systems Division in Manchester is expected to reveal further details of the parallel system when it formally announces a commercial agreement for the Chorus technology next week or soon after. ICL is already working with Ingres Corp and Oracle Corp on prototype databases for its server, which will be able to cope with SQL queries from a variety of sources, including its OpenVME mainframes and DRS 6000 Unix boxes. Until now, ICL says, commercial users have had to re-engineer applications to take advantage of parallel CPU architectures, and have proved unwilling to do so. The moment database vendors come out with versions that do it automatically, the rules change, it says.
