Digital Equipment Corp is only a few strides behind IBM Corp in the concept of clustering workstations to create highly parallel configurations. IBM has got to the point where it has baptised the concept the RS/6000 Cluster Service Offering, but a twist in DEC’s plan is to enable alien workstations to be included in the cluster – according to Electronic News, it conceives of creating clusters of Alpha-based workstations within one to two years and then to move on to embracing alien machines, with the benefit that stations could be used as stand-alone units when no parallel work was running. The company is banking on communications technology arriving in time that the dispersed machines can be linked together at speed of at least 100 Mbytes per second – FDDI runs at 100 M-bits per second, and the company is looking at Asynchronous Transfer Mode, the emerging broadband fixed-cell packet system for the links. DEC suggests that in the second generation, workstations from Sun Microsystems Inc, Hewlett-Packard Co, IBM and Silicon Graphics Inc might all be included in the clusters, which suggests that the Open Software Foundation’s Distributed Computing Environment will play an important role. The company even acknowledges that its software might one day be used to cluster workstations that were all alien, with no Alpha-based ones in there. Following its agreements with Maspar Computer Corp and Intel Corp, DEC now has three more conventional massively parallel streams on the go the Single Instruction-Multiple Data machines that it will build using MasPar’s chip, the Multiple Instruction-Multiple Data machines it plans using Intel’s 80860XP chip and technology, and an Alpha-based massively parallel machine set for 1995.
