E1AR0002@SMUVM1.BITNET.UUCP (10/25/87)
Summary of Spang Robinson Report on Supercomputing and Parallel Processing Volume 1 , No. 2 The lead article is on Hypercube based systems emphasizing the offerings from Intel, NCUBE and Floating Point Systems. The first implementation of the Hypercube based architectures was in the Soviet Union in the 1970's. Spang Robinson estimates revenues from 15 to 20 million dollars per year from Hypercube companies in 1987. OVUM predicts 1.15 billion dollar revenue from hypercubes in 1990. Intel Scientific Computers has benchmarked its 80286 based vector processor with 32 nodes against a Cray X-MP on a Fluid Dynamics Code and achieved equivalent performance. The iPSC/2 has 80386 and 80387 in each node with 512KB. They use Unix V.3 and a Concurrent Workbench which allows multiple users to share the node. System prices ranges from $165,000 to $1.76 million for systems from 16 nodes to 128 nodes. The 64 node vector processor sells for $929 thousand. Floating Point Systems reports 1.2 GigaFlps on their T200 system. They have made a total of ten installations. The node contains a T414 Transputer as a control node, a vector processor, 1 meg of RAM and four communication links. Each node takes one printed circuit board and eight nodes are grouped with an 80 meg disk storage unit. A T-20 costing $400,000 contains 16 nodes and is rated at 192 MFLOPS. A T200 with 128 nodes costs 3 millions. They use a DEC micro VAX II to host the system and some system programming is done in OCCAM. One is installed at Clemson University where they are install SPICE. Ametek sold several S-14 systems and is working on a second-geeneration product with announcements planned before the end of 1987. They have doubled their building space. NCUBE uses a proprietary chip at each node with 512 kilobytes of memory and twenty-two DMA channels. 64 nodes are on a single printed circuit board. The NCUBE 7 goes to 128 nodes ($350,000 with 500 MB DISK) and the NCUBE 10 goes to 1024 nodes ($1.7 million). An NCUBE 4 that fits in a PC is from $20,000 to $60,000. They use a UNIX like operating system. A total of 70 installations have been made with half in Universities. ___________________________________________________________________ Book Review: The Supercomputer Era by Sidney Karin and Norris Parker Smith _________________________________________________________________________ Discussions of Cray Research changes included the departure of Steve Chen. Steve Chen has formally announced a new corporation to continue the research. __________________________________________________________________________ The NSA has set up its own supercomputer development project, deciding that industry will not produce products meeting its need.