Intel Corp yesterday duly unveiled its first 80860-based versions of its iPSC massively parallel hypercubes. The new iSPC/860 is rated at up to 7.6 GFLOPS peak – at a tenth the cost of a Cray Y-MP, Intel claims; it supports up to 2Mb main memory and over 100Gb of disk. The machine is the first fruits of the Defense Advanced Research Projects-backed – to the tune of $7.6m – Touchstone project to develop a 150 GFLOPS machine by 1992 (CI No 1,157). The iPSC/860 comes with from 16 to 128 80860s and start at $265,000 for the 480 MFLOPS entry model. New software for the machine include the Unix-compatible Network Queueing System developed at NASA Ames; Pacific-Sierra Research Inc’s Forge Fortran parallelising converter; Scientific Computing Associates Inc’s Linda and AIL Ltd’s Strand 88, both languages for creating portable parallel code; and Block Island Technologies Inc’s Interwork, which optimises parallel performance. Ships start in March; over 200 80286- and 80386-based iPSCs, source code compatible with the iPSC, have been installed so far. First customers for the new machine include Boeing Co, Ford Motor Co, the US Institute for Computer Applications in Science & Engineering and NASA Langley Research Center. Prudential-Bache Securities, already an iPSC user, will upgrade to an iPSC/860 within weeks. Gesellschaft fur Strahlen Forschung mBH is also to use one for studies in pollution control.
