leff@smu.UUCP (Laurence Leff) (04/03/88)
The Spang Robinson Re[port on Supercomputing and Parallel Processing
February, 1988 Volume 2, Number 2
Lead Article is on "The Parallel Software Picture"
This article discusses varioius "grainiedness" of processing.
25 of Cray's customer's converted to Unix with 50 installations
intending to convert to UNIX. Half of Cray's new orders are UNIX.
The article reports that for fine-grained parallelism (vector
processing), pre-compilers and compilers are extracting most of the available
parallelism.
Companies providing parallelizing tools for vector computers include:
COMPASS, Pacific Sierra Research, Scientific Computer Associates
Coarse-grained optimization is not in good shape (the article has
quotes from many to support these claims).
A "language triangle" is shown where the three viewpoints are
"prescriptive," e. g. machine language, logic programming and
"denotative" e. g. pure lisp or FP. Various languages are put in
the triangle at various places.
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ETA has a contenst where the prize is an ETA 10P to a high school.
ETA will pay the costs including electricity for two years.
The high schools participating will be submitting a project done
by a three student team.
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Cray Announcements
Cray announced a top of the line Y-MP 832, a DS-40 disk system and
the FEI-3 interface. The computer is 30 times the speed of the original CRAY-1.
The price is twenty million.
The FEI-3 interfaces Ethernet to the Cray.
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Shorts
Floating point system appointed HOward Thrailkill as its new CEO.
James R. Newcomb, who headed up the PDA international (mechanical
engineering CADCAM) is now vice president for strategic software
business development for Ardent Computers.
Celerity has dropped its vector-scalar 6000 lines and laid off 70 people
out of 100.
Sequent reported a 92 percent increase in revenues. It had 38.5 revenue
and 4 million in profits.
Cray Research made 687 million and installed a total of 55 computer systems.
BMW has bought a Cray X-MP/28.
Multiflow now has an installed based of 19.
The United Kingdom's Meteorological Office has bought an ETA10-E.
Supertek, a Cray compatible manufacturer, has raised at least four
million in its second financing round.
National Science Foundation has selected MERIT to manage the
implementation of the NSFNet backbone center. IBM will contribute
packet switching hardware nad MCI will provide T1 circuits.
Oregon State has sponsored formation of the Oregon Institute for
Advanced Computing which is affiliated with the Oregon Graduate Center.
Cydrome's dataflow unit has achieved 10.4 Megaflops on the Linpack 100x100
test and 3.7 for the Livermore Fortran Kernals. System costs $575,000.
Encore has announced a 4 MIPS entry level system for $89,000.
Alliant introduced the FX/40 and FX/80.
The FX/80 is rated at 65MFLOPS for the 1000 x 1000
Linpack measure.
San Diego Scientific Computing System has announced the SCS-30 XM a machine that
delivers 75 percent of the performance of an SCS-40 at 60 percent of the price.