Unisys Corp duly threw its hat into the massively parallel processing ring last week, unveiling Opus, its Open Parallel Unisys Server, which teams Intel Corp’s Pentium-based scalable parallel processing system with a new blend of Unix System V.4.0 and the Chorus Systemes SA microkernel wrapped in a single system image, targeted at decision support and data warehousing for business and government users (CI No 2,652). Opus is the second commercial string in Intel’s bow after Sequent Computer Systems Inc. It claims two other OEM customers under negotiation. Intel honed its ‘shared nothing’ parallel technology in the technical world with the 80860-based Paragon, running OSF/1. Opus makes good an August 1993 pact between the two firms; Unisys reckons the system, described as its most important product since the company was formed nine years ago, will win it $100m business this year, a goal that calls for winning a 30% market share by 2000. The massively parallel processing market, estimated at $1,000m a year now, rising to $5,000m by 1998, is dominated by AT&T Corp’s Teradata and, to a lesser extent, IBM Corp’s SP2, which Unisys is targeting. Officials wouldn’t say how much the firm has ploughed into the effort, but development costs certainly will not be recouped from the returns expected for the first year. Opus uses a 175Mbps mesh interconnect with a copy of the microkernel on each node. Up to four 16-node domains can be housed in each cabinet. Each node comes with up to 64Mb RAM, SCSI-2 interfaces and Ethernet. Unisys says it has a P6 version up and running, which, using P6’s Orion bus and an up-rated int-erconnect, provides four times the Pentium system’s bandwidth. Intel is also testing a Distributed Shared Memory Protocol for scalable parallel processing and is working on other clustering technology. Unisys says its single system image enables all resources, memory, storage, printers, users and communications devices, to be viewed as if they were part of a single system. It has Oracle7 Parallel Server and the Red Brick Systems Inc data warehouse up on Opus. There is little else parallelised for it, but Unisys plans other middleware and services later in the year to address this re-uirement, plus high-availability transaction processing technologies and inducements to get its mainframers up on the things. An eight-way Opus with 40Gb disk is $685,000; IBM charges about $400,000 for eight-way SP2s.
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