Digital Equipment Corp has found its first partner in France for the Alpha AXP RISC in the shape of a start-up company formed by Jacques Stern, founder of software and systems integration house Sesa SA and former chairman and chief executive of Compagnie des Machines Bull SA. The new company, Advanced Computer Research International SA, or ACRI, of Lyon, has signed a co-operation agreement with DEC France under which DEC will take an undisclosed minority stake to seal the pact. DEC’s 64-bit Alpha AXP microprocessor will be incorporated in the original architecture of the parallel ACRI system and the two companies will work together to optimise DEC’s implementation of the OSF/1 Unix operating system for highly parallel multiprocessor systems. Richard Poulsen, the new president of Digital Europe, commented We were impressed by the ACRI system architecture design and the outstanding quality of its international team. This collaboration between DEC and ACRI will play a key role in building a competitive high performance computing infrastructure in Europe as reflected in the European Commission’s recent Rubbia Report – the European Commission asked Professor Carlo Rubbia to chair a committee of experts from industry and public research laboratories to assess Europe’s standing with respect to high performance computing and networking. The report, presented in November 1992, said that while Europe was totally absent from the vector supercomputing arena, there was a unique opportunity to establish a high performance computing and networking programme.
