Targeting commercial markets, in traditional engineering and scientific domains and in the newer area of data analysis, seems an increasingly attractive option for supercomputer vendors. Sunnyvale, California-based MasPar Computer Corp for instance is claiming that with the arrival of its new MP-2 machine – already beta testing in the US and due for formal introduction on Tuesday, October 6 – it will be ‘moving massive parallel processing into the mainstream’. The company, which has been shipping systems since January 1990 and has has a 14-month-old OEM relationship with Digital Equipment Corp (CI No 1,742), caters for the mid-range area of the market, the $100,000 to $1m bracket. It has sold 130 systems, has around an 8% share of the world market and was declared the fastest-growing massive parallel processing company in 1991. Turnover increased to $18.6m in 1991 from $6m in 1990 and is expected virtually to double this year.
Fluid dynamics
Having achieved success in areas such as image processing and recognition, signal processing, fluid dynamics and computational chemistry, MasPar is extending its focus to other commercial compute- and data-intensive applications. The company is convinced that massively parallel computers are destined to revolutionise the workplace, holding and analysing Gigabytes of data and enabling interactive decisions to be progressed at corporate level in ways that are not possible on present-day mainframes. Obvious applications are the analysis of market research findings or census and health care data by government agencies. The Table-Maker statistical analysis package from MasPar’s partner Chisq Ltd, for example, can perform three way cross tabulations from 4Gb of census data in 55 seconds – 30 times faster than the largest mainframes. Also worth consideration, MasPar says, are continuous speech recognition, high-speed image recognition and financial analysis (a 30 second advantage on the stock market is equivalent to a licence to steal). A New York company is even looking into a system for translating news wires on a parallel processor. The challenge for supercomputer vendors is to make their systems suitably scalable, affordable and programmable – demands that MasPar is confident that its new machine will satisfy.
By Lynn Stratton
Kendall Square Research Inc of Waltham, Massachusetts feels pretty much the same about its KSR1 machine launched in the spring of last year (CI No 1,822) and about to be marketed in Europe. The KSR1 scales from eight to 1,088 processors, with a peak performance of 43 GigaFLOPS, 34Gb memory, 15 Gbps of input-output bandwidth and 15Tb of disk storage. It delivers 2.7 times the performance of a Cray Research Inc Y-MP C90. The secret of the KSR1’s scalability and programmability lies in its AllCache memory management architecture, Kendall chief executive Henry Burkhardt III claims. Under this, distributed memory can be programmed like a conventional shared memory, with addresses distributed and shared according to processor need and access rather than have a fixed location. Memory traffic is kept close to the processor using it to avoid congestion. Scaling 1,000 processors involves a hierarchical clustering of processors and memory, hence the KSR1 incorporates two AllCache engines, a 32-processor Engine0 connected by the AllCache Router and Directory Cell to the AllCache Engine1 comprising 34 Engine0s. Convinced of the need for parallel systems to conform to open standards, Kendall Square has sucessfully implemented Oracle7; KSR Query Decomposer; Micro Focus Plc Cobol/2 1.2; Unix System Laboratories Inc’s Tuxedo/T 4.2 transaction monitor for the KSR1 and is assiduously converting and adapting third party applications in addition – 30 will be in place by the end of 1992. As part of its European initatives, the company has set up a Software Developer’s Programme under which value-added resellers and systems integrators will be given special lease or purchase terms for development systems. New offices have been opened at Heathrow, London in the UK; Sevres, Paris
in France; and Munich and Hanover in Germany with the first European installation to be at Manchester University’s Department of Computer Science. The Department, which is headed by Professor Frank Sumner, co-inventor of the virtual memory programming environment, intends to have a national computing service, mainly for other academics, running on its new machine by November. An order has also been received from the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique, INRIA, in France and the company hopes that by 1993 between 10 and 12 European installations will have been secured.
Commercial
Kendall Square sees its excursion in to Europe as an important plank of its over all marketing strategy. It estimates the potential supercomputing market to be divided as follows: computer science research at around $200m; government and university research centres with $2,000 now; and industrial and commercial research centres with $10,000m; commercial, industrial and governmental data processing around $30,000m in two or three years. Having targeted high end users such researchers, government and commercial laboratories and universities in 1992, Kendall Square intends, through 1993, to develop systems for commercial scientific and technical vertical markets such as aerospace, defence, cars, chemistry and energy. It will be focussing its attention on the world’s 500 largest computer users and will also be continuing its efforts to attract commercial application software. There are no plans at present to make a play for the Japanese market, although the company is certainly keeping a watchful eye on developments there.
