Sun Microsystems Inc has revealed more of its future clustering plans and is preparing several systems based upon the Dolphin Interconnect Solutions A/S Scalable Coherent Interface technologies it licensed last December. It will deliver the capability in stages, probably beginning as soon as next month (CI Nos 2,836, 2,997). It is definitely not going the cache-coherent route a la Data General Corp’s Non-Uniform Memory Architecture implementation but will address what it believes is the sweet spot of the market; linking symmetric multiprocessing servers with a low-latency interconnect and using message-passing software to linking applications distributed across nodes. There will be several variants of switch enabling up to 16 SunFires – Ultra Enterprise servers – to be connected with latencies of below 10 microseconds and high bandwidths. Configurations that large – 480 CPUs – will be strictly for the classic scientific and engineering crowd. Smaller systems of two or four nodes will be packaged for commercial types. The Cray Research Inc SuperSparc-based Superservers that Sun now owns and UltraSparc makeovers of them will be treated as just another node. Sun will use Message Passing Interface and Parallel Virtual Machines for messaging and deliver system-wide batch processing and load balancing functions. Sun is not giving the illusion that there won’t be a change in the programming model, the Message Passing Interface will necessitate that, but it is far less keen on voguish cache-coherent, massively parallel and single system image arrangements, believing that the jury is still deliberating on those. It says it plans to collect all of its clustering software onto a single CD-ROM that will go far beyond its current Ethernet-based SparcClustering capabilities. Further out, it expects to accommodate workstations, High Performance Fortran parallelizing tools and possibly Thinking Machines Corp’s GlobalWorks parallelizing software. It is still using Fiber Channel for input-output.
