Cambridge Parallel Processing Ltd of Bracknall, Berkshire and Irvine, California, has introduced its next generation massively parallel DAP Distributed Array Processor in two models, the Gamma 1000 and 4000. Its also announced DAPText, its first text retrieval package for massively parallel systems. The Gamma machines are single instruction-multiple data systems and come with 1,024 processors for the Gamma 1000, 4,096 for the 4000. The processors are custom-built for the systems and are manufactured under contract by VLSI Technology Inc, Cambridge Parallel says. Each processor in the array contains a general purpose single bit processor, used for low precision transactions, and an 8-bit arithmetic processor, which is used for intensive computational operations. The Gamma 1000 is configured with up to 128Mb RAM. The Gamma 4000 comes with up to 512Mb of RAM. Both machines can be connected to host Unix systems from Sun Microsystems Inc, Hewlett-Packard Co and Digital Equipment Corp. Existing Cambridge Parallel DAP 500 machines can be upgraded to the Gamma series, the company says. Cambridge Parallel has also introduced DAPText, a high-performance text retrieval package for network services such as news wires and document searches. It runs on Cambridge Parallel machines and supported Unix host systems. Cambridge Parallel claims DAText can search 140 queries per second, with response times of less than one tenth of a second. The software is available now, but no prices were given.
