As expected (CI No 2,223), Intel Corp and Unisys Corp yesterday made public their plan to co-operate on a range of parallel processing initiatives – including the development of a massively parallel system – which they hope will lead to the creation of a new breed of commercial systems based upon multiple Pentium CPUs. The new system, being co-designed by Unisys and Intel’s Supercomputer Systems Division, will run Unisys’ implementation of the Unix System Laboratories Inc’s Unix System V.4 microkernel, which is based on Chorus Systemes SA’s Chorus/Mix system software. It will use the Intel unit’s 175Mb per second SPP parallel interconnection system previously employed on the 80860 RISC-based Paragon XP/S supercomputer series. Unisys will develop systems management, administration and application software on the machine and will use a prototype system supplied to it by Intel as the basis of a new line of commercial parallel systems using Pentium. As in traditional parallel architectures, each node of the new system will come with one or more CPUs plus its own memory and input-output. Tasks are spread across the nodes, which are joined via the SPP interconnect system. Unisys is co-designing the node boards and has contributed to the input-output and system initialisation (BIOS software) services. It will also develop distributed applications and utilities and employ parallel database and Mapper and Link tools on top of the Unix microkernel operating system, employing some of Intel Supercomputer’s parallel software techniques. The Intel company claims to have some 400 installations of its Paragon and previous generation supercomputers. The two firms quote market research outfit Smaby Group, which forecasts the market for scalable parallel processors will be worth $1,670m by 1997 – 65% ($1,090m) of which is expected to be accounted for by commercial applications. The two offered no time-scales for completion or delivery of the new technologies, but sources say that the initial system is up to 18 months away. Moreover, back in June (CI No 2,189), we reported that Intel’s Supercomputer Systems was going to market a Pentium-based massively parallel processor from an unidentified OEM partner, thought to be Unisys. For Unisys, the agreement provides a means to commercialise the next logical technology step up from multiprocessing, without all of the associated research and development costs. Other manufacturers, including IBM Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co, Digital Equipment Corp, Tandem Computers Inc and ICL Plc are all working on parallel system development – IBM should have systems out by year-end – while Teradata, part of AT&T Co’s NCR Corp unit, has already had some commercial success with iAPX-86 parallel database processor technology.
