Parsys Ltd, London NW, has come out with a new version of its 30MHz T805 Transputer-based SuperNode 1000 parallel processor optimised to run the Oracle Corp relational database system and calling it the SN2000. It is going into beta test now with ships planned for early next year. It runs Oracle 6.0.36 with the parallel server technology. The Unix-like operating system supports TCP/IP, SCSI peripheral controllers and an X Window interface. The company reckons that the thing will work out at $1,500 per transaction per second in the TPC-B benchmark, and notes that by comparison, a shared memory multiprocessor does about $8,000 per TPC-B per second. The machine is scalable from eight to over 1,000 processors, in the latter case theoretically doing about 10,000 transactions per second against about 450 for a large conventional mainframe. A 10 processor system, 2Gb of disk, 5Gb tape and Ethernet would be UKP42,000 and do some 500 transactions per second; an 87-CPU box is some UKP265,000.
