masscomp@soma.bcm.tmc.edu (Stan Barber, Moderator) (05/03/87)
This is the first of many installments summarizing what happened at the 1987 Annual MUS meeting held in Braintree, MA from Tuesday, April 27th until Thursday, April 30th. Initially, I will summarize those things I personnally took notes on. Any other persons who want to submit summaries, please do so. Tuesday, Doug Rowan (VP Sales and Marketing) gave a talk on Masscomp. Basically, the company is doing well. Machines in the field are averaging 14 months MTBF with about 800 customer accounts. Recent product annoucements include 3 CPU capability on the 5600 (not the 5700!) and favorable benchmark comparisions between the 5450 and a Sun 3/160. Later that day, Dave Cane (VP for R&D) gave a talk on near-term (3 yr) developments. Here is some of the points I recorded. 1. Look for new Masscomp computers to use the VME bus as the I/O bus. A path will be available for owners of the Multibus line to upgrade to the VME-based archtecture. The MI bus will still be used for all "high-speed" interconnects (e.g. memory, FPA, VA, etc). 2. The 68030-chip will likely be the basic CPU for the VME-based line of computers. 3. Multiprocessor capability will be available on all computers in the VME-based line: from the smallest to the largest. The largest computer may be capable of having 12 processors on the bus with the possibility of many VME busses to increase I/O bandwidth. 4. They are looking into offering a very low-cost product that will be VME-based but have the CPU, memory and disk controller on one VME board. Since the card count will be low and the package small, this computer should be cheaper than the current 5300. 5. NFS should be available at the end of the calender year (more on networking in another summary). 6. Diskless nodes may be supported. This might be useful for creating "dedicated" computers that are basically data-acq stations that take to a network and ship the data direct to disk on another machine. 7. Look for a new DACP product line that will give 10x performance over the currect product line. Two products will likely be offered. One will be a programable DACP, but much faster and the other will be an ASIC (Application Specific Intergrated Circuit) system that will not be programmable (i.e. code is not down-loaded at boot), but will be optimized for what many customers do with DACP now. This product will also be faster and probably about the same cost as the current DACP. 8. Also, DACP modules may be developed to plug directly into VME instead of the current STD bus. 9. Look for a better solution to the hardcopy from the graphics screen problem (software) in the Summer 88 time frame. 10. A vectorizing FORTRAN compiler is being considered as is more work on ADA. 11. Work will be done on the VA-1 product line to being the increment in performace more in line with expectations (i.e. the VA should be much faster than the FPA for vector calculations when the vector size is greater than some number like 60 or so [my opinion on the number --sob]). This is the end of summary 1. If you were there and you disagree with my statements here, please drop me a line. Stan Barber, President Masscomp Users' Society Moderator of comp.sys.masscomp
masscomp@soma.bcm.tmc.edu (Stan Barber, Moderator) (04/23/88)
This is the first of many installments summarizing what happened at the 1988 Annual MUS meeting held in Danvers, MA from Tuesday, April 19th until Thursday, April 21st. Initially, I will summarize those things I personnally took notes on. Any other persons who want to submit summaries, please do so. In this summary, I will go over the MUS business that took place at the meeting. 1. Elections: We held elections for Vice-President and Treasurer as specified by our by-laws. We also held elections for President since I chose to resign due to lack of time to serve as President. We relected Tom O'Bryan (from U.S.G.S) to continue as Treasurer and Jim White (from the University of Tennessee Space Institute) to continue as Vice-President. David Busath of Brown University was selected to replace me as President. Dale Chayes contines as Secretary. Next year, the regular election will be for President and Secretary as specified in the By-Laws. 2. By-Laws: The by-laws changes proposed by the executive committee were approved by the membership in attendance. They will take effect with the printing of the new by-laws in the next issue of MUSings. These changes have been summarized in MUSings. If you are unaware of the nature of the changes, contact me and I will send you a copy of the articles altered. 3. Membership Directory: We will publish a membership directory this next year. If you are a MUS member, you will receive a information update form. On this form you will be able to tell us if you want your information published in the directory. We must hear from you to publish your information. This will likely occur sometime before the winter. 4. Communications: We will make a major effort to get more people able to use UUCP and electronic mail next year. This should improve the usage of comp.sys.masscomp in addition to providing a better conduit from the membership to the executive committee. Additional comments about the conference in general: There were over 110 people at the meeting. This makes it the largest national meeting MUS has had thus far. Initial feed back is that things went well. If you have a opinion you'd like to share, please drop us a line (electronically or otherwise). This is the end of summary 1. If you were there and you disagree with my statements here, please drop me a line. Stan Barber, Immediate Past President Masscomp Users' Society Moderator of comp.sys.masscomp