newsbytes@clarinet.com (01/14/90)
TOKYO, JAPAN, 1990 JAN 4 (NB) -- One of the most advanced American parallel processing supercomputer will land to Japan through the Japanese system house, Advanced Systems Co., Ltd. The supercomputer is the Connection Machine CM-2 series of Thinking Machine Corporation. Sales of the machine to foreign countries have been prohibited because it was developed with financial aid from the Pentagon. Japan is the third country approved for purchase of the computer following France and Sweden. The CM-2 series has the so-called HyperCube, an inter-processing network architecture capable of connecting up to 65,526 of central processing units and performing at 10 giga FLOPS (floating point operation per second). Thinking Machines is one of the fastest growing firms in the supercomputer industry and is doing research into parallel processing with Digital Equipment Corporation. Some computer science magazines are reporting difficulties in the machine's operation compared to the Transputer, a central processing unit specially developed for parallel processing by Inmos. Advanced System, however, plans to enhance the CM-2 with DEC's VAX series or Sun Microsystems workstation as a front end processor to avoid such difficulties. The Advanced Telecommunication Research Institute will be the first Japanese customer and is expecting installation of the machine in April. (Naoyuki Yazawa/19900111/Press Contact: Advanced Systems, 0425-25-6295)