leff@smu.UUCP (Laurence Leff) (01/04/88)
Summary of Spang Robinson Report on Supercomputing and Paralell Processing,
December 1987, Volume 1, No. 4
Lead Article is on Parallel Tightly Coupled Share Memory Systems
BBN has installed 90 Butterflys and 50 of its earlier system, the
Pluribus. The Butterfly Plus is an upgrade path for existing users at
$6,000 per node. Initial cost is $164,000 for ten processors, 30 for
$429,000 and 100 processors for 1.4 million.
The GP1000 is a UNIX system based on the Mach 1000. The RT1000 is
for real time.
Sequent has 350 installations. The system uses Intel 80386 processors.
The S27 supprts 2 to 10 processors. The S81 can support up to 30
processors and 1000 users.
Cost ranges from $89,000 to $800,000.
Encore has sold over a 100 Multimax systems and has won a 10.7 million
DARPA contract called Ultramax. Prototype Ultramax systems are shipping.
The system has a 100 million byte per second bus. The Multimax 320 uses a
National Semiconductor 32332 with optional Weitek 1164/1165 floating
point set. A Multimax 320 users with twenty processors costs $900,000
and suports 400 users. Software includes AT&T and 4.2BSD based OS's
and Quadratron's office automation with Oracle database to follow.
Compilation of the 330,000 line
ADA test suite required 3.5 hours on a Multimax 120 with 16 processors
and 64 MB of memory.
Flexible Computer is now using a 68020 microprocessor as its base and
will have an optional Weitek 1164/1165 unit. Flexible allows up to
20 processors per cabinet and 1024 maximum cabinets. A 40 processor
system is being used
by MCC in its database research.
A four node system costs $200,000 and a twenty node system will be $625,000.
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Article on the Problems at MIT with the potential order for a Honeywell-NEC
processor.
Honeywell-NEC was to install a NEC SX-2 at MIT. However, it would continue
to own the processor while MIT would pay for its time at reduced rates.
The Acting Secretary of Commerce wrote to MIT saying "it had no objection
to MIT buying a Japanese supercomputer, but if a Japanese company
'dumped' a supercomputer at MIT, it would investigate the you know what
out of the situation." Then Honeywell-NEC and Amdahl withdrew their offers.
Then Honeywell-NEC said, 'We ended our offer for reasons having to do with
on-going trade negotiations between the United States and Japan.'"
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Article on the ETA systems low end announcement.
Six systems have been sold; four are in contract/letter of intent phase.
The ETA-10P 1 million dollar machine achieves 23 megaflops on the LINPAK
benchmark. Cray 1S does the test in 12 megaflops.
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Article on Parallel processing in Europe.
The GMD of Germany will be setting up supercomputer centers, networking,
departmental machines and experimental parallel processing.
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Benchmarks on Plasma Code Benchmark
MFLOPS MFLOPS/million DM
IBM 3090 VF 23.0 4.6
Cray-2 283.3 5.7
Siemens (Fujitsu) VP-200 302.5 15.1
TX3-80387 124.8 62.4
TX3-8087 and Weitek Unit 357.5 143.0
The TX3 is a binary tree based MIMD system based on the INTEL 80386
with optional Weitek floating point unit.
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Shorts;
Multiflow has delivered five TRACE 7/200 systems.
Concurrent has acquired the Navier-Stokes machine technology from Princeton
University.
Cray has intalled a fifteen million dollar computer at MITI (Japan).
Tandem is entering the computer integrated manufacturing business.
Scientific Computer Systems has set up a subsidiary in Paris and
has installed a system at Ecole Polytechnique in France.
Cray has earned over 500 million in revenue and has announced a program
to buy back ten percent of its outstanding hsares.
Alliant's revenue is 14.2 million as opposed to 8.6 million the prvious
year.
Tandem computers has revenue just above one billion a year.
Engineering Systems International has ported its PAM-CRASH software for
analyzing crashworthiness of autos and other vehicles ot hte Convex.
Informix has announced relational database products for the Cray-2.