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