cmt@myrias.UUCP (Chris Thomson) (11/09/88)
Following is the press release for our recent product announcement.
I have not edited it to remove "commercial content"; please don't be
offended. Technical articles will follow shortly.
Myrias Computer Corporation announces SPS-2 massively parallel processor
with automatic programming environment. Breakthrough in programming
environment for parallel systems; hardware scales from 64 to 1024 Motorola
68020 processors.
Edmonton, Alberta -- November 7, 1988 -- Myrias Computer Corporation
established itself as a technology leader in parallel processing by
announcing the SPS-2 (Scalable Parallel Supercomputer), with an
automatic programming environment designed for physical scientists.
The Myrias PAMS (Parallel Application Management System), and the underlying
"PAMS Engine", provides a FORTRAN and C environment with automatic
management of parallelism, scalability, and program debugging. It also
distributes work automatically to keep the complete system loaded,
overcoming one of the major limitations of parallel systems.
According to Chairman of the Myrias board, F.T. White, "Parallel system
architectures offer dramatic advantages in price/performance based on
microprocessor economics, but the difficulty of managing system complexity,
and debugging time-dependent errors on earlier systems has limited the
development of significant applications, because both programming and
debugging have taken months to years. This has inhibited their use by
physical scientists and engineers, and most program development on previous
parallel systems has been done by computer scientists.
"The inspiration for the Myrias system came from physical scientists,
who have created a programming environment that requires no special
programming skills," he said. "Users have been able to convert codes
to parallel operation on the system in hours."
"A FORTRAN or C user of the Myrias system," continued Mr. White, "writes one
statement to initiate parallelism - a parallel DO statement named 'pardo',
and management of parallel operation is then handled automatically and
transparently by the PAMS Engine, believed to be unique in the industry.
The same application can run on any number of processors without
recompilation, and variations in load from different tasks or different
input data are automatically and dynamically balanced by the PAMS Engine."
The "pardo" is the only language construct that the user programmer sees in
order to invoke parallelism. Parallel Fortran and C subprograms can be
combined; pardo can be used within recursive subroutines, and can be nested.
PAMS has been in operation for 18 months on a 512-processor prototype (the
SPS-1) in Myrias' Edmonton laboratory. A version is available for
application development on Sun workstations. PAMS has a transportable
implementation, enabling Myrias to take advantage of new hardware platforms.
The SPS-2 is scalable, and can be built up from 64 to over a thousand
processors to provide supercomputer performance. The system will be
effective on a range of applications and methods such as: geophysics,
molecular modelling, molecular dynamics, image and signal processing, Ising
models, aerodynamic and hydrodynamic modelling, particle transport models,
n-body simulations, ray tracing, multi-dimensional transformations and
convolutions, text processing and retrieval, VLSI design, and others.
Peter Gregory, Vice President of Marketing for Myrias, said, "Myrias has
made a quantum leap in making parallelism accessible to user scientists. It
has been designed by users, and for users; at the same time, it exploits the
parallelism that is inherent in many natural processes."
"Fifteen years of development in vector systems have demonstrated that the
"factor-of-twenty" peak performance of which vector systems are capable is
seldom realized in practice," he continued. "Even mature users of large
vector systems average less than three times the scalar speed of their
systems. While parallelism is natural in many physical applications, and is
increasingly recognized by the supercomputer community as a necessity to
obtaining higher performance, vectorization does not occur naturally. Even
though much effort has gone into automatic vectorizing compilers over the
last 15 years, most have produced limited performance gains unless the
FORTRAN application is restructured. The Myrias PAMS Engine easily exploits
application parallelism, allowing very large applications to be addressed;
the same programming environment can be carried to larger configurations and
to faster microprocessor platforms as they become available. "Because large
applications require large memory, the SPS-2 provides a huge global virtual
memory backed by a physical memory that ranges from 256 MB to 4 GB. All of
virtual memory is addressable by each processor. We expect to see this
practical massively parallel system complement the use of traditional vector
computers and open new applications," he said.
PAMS is a significant breakthrough in parallel processing technology. The
user sees only:
- parallel Fortran and parallel C languages with a single pardo extension
- a Unix environment
- parallel code that is:
- easy to write
- easy to understand
- easy to debug
- easy to operate
The PAMS Engine provides:
- automatic task distribution
- automatic task initiation, synchronization, and termination
- automatic scaling
- automatic system load balancing
- automatic memory management
Full SPS-2 systems start from $750,000 for a 64-processor system with
256 MB of memory. The first customer delivery will be made in the
first quarter of 1989.
The SPS-2 is marketed by Myrias Computer Corporation of Boston, MA, a
wholly-owned US subsidiary of Myrias Research Corporation of Edmonton,
Alberta. The company designs, manufactures, markets and supports
parallel computer systems for use by industry, research laboratories
and universities.
PAMS is a trademark of Myrias Computer Corporation.
Myrias is a registered trademark of Myrias Research Corporation.
Myrias Computer Corporation
900 Park Plaza, 10611 98 Avenue
Edmonton, Alberta T5K 2P7
Telephone (403) 428-1616, Fax (403) 421-8979
--
Chris Thomson, Myrias Research Corporation uunet!alberta!myrias!cmt
900 10611 98 Ave, Edmonton Alberta, Canada 403-428-1616