Pyramid Technology Corp, which claims to have sold more than 100 of its Nile symmetric multiprocessors since their launch in October last year, is already working – like practically everyone else these days, it seems – on clustering the things for high-end commercial users. The Mountain View, California-based company’s idea is to implement the open systems version of parallel Sysplex, which it intends to do by loosely coupling its systems with the mesh-type interconnect bus already being used in its Meshine database accelerator. Pyramid says the bus is capable of linking not only Niles, Meshine – due later this year – and the ICL Plc Goldrush parallel database server which Pyramid intends to resell, but other third party systems too – from laptops to mainframes, it claims. Nodes will have between two and six processors in each draw and each running a copy of Pyramid’s DC/OSX System V.4 implementation. Pyramid’s endeavour with ICL on software will provide a single system image. The aim is to offer a system that can handle serial and parallel loads, and can simultaneously undertake transaction processing and decision support.