London-based massively parallel house Parsys Ltd has gone and done precisely what managing director Ian Coburn said last year it wouldn’t do: turn to a conventional RISC microprocessor architecture a la Parsytec GmbH. As reported briefly (CI No 2,663), Parsys is hitching Inmos T9000 Transputers to Digital Equipment Corp’s 266MHz Alpha 21066 RISC chip as the TransAlpha parallel processing system. It should be up and running by September, the company claims. Parsys has followed Parsytec’s lead – the German company has a T9000+PowerPC-based massively parallel system – because T9000 can not match the performance which RISC chips now offer: frankly the Transputer falls down in the MFLOPS area, Coburn said. The machine has a hybrid processor board, combining Alpha for raw horsepower and T9000s for communication. The architecture presents the system to the software as a ‘virtual Transputer.’ The Transputer offers the communications infrastructure, bandwidth that Parsys claims is effectively four FDDI bandwidth per processor and a ‘virtual channel’ processor for message-passing that is claimed to handle up to 16,000 actual channels. The TransAlpha is hosted from Sun Microsystems Inc or DEC workstations running a Power Virtual Machines programming environment that Parsys co-developed with Associated Computer Experts BV. Desktop configurations go up to 12 nodes with 800Mb of main memory, delivering a peak performance of 2.8 GFLOPS and 150Mbps bandwidth. The thing could go to 512 processors. Right now it has a 128-processor system in a single 19 rack with a bandwidth of 3.8Gbps per second. There are no TransAlphas in the field yet but four or five possible deals are cooking. Other Alpha devices can be added as Peripheral Component Interconnect modules. Further down the line, Parsys doesn’t rule out doing the same with other chip sets. It is targeting TransAlpha at the video-on-demand and data mining market and says it will flesh out details later next month. The company says it has sold 22 of the T9000-only SN9400s and eight of the SN9500s launched last year. Coburn admits the company has paid the price of hibernation, waiting for the delivery of the long-delayed T9000. It claims profits of ú1.2m for 1994, its first positive numbers since 1991. Parsys has 33 employees. The 12-processor TA9500 version goes from ú100,000 and a 64-processor version from ú600,000.
