pezely@cis.udel.edu (Daniel Pezely) (10/04/90)
For those interested, DIVISION can be reached at:
DIVISION, Limited
Quarry Road, Chipping Sodbury
Bristol BS17 6AX, UK
voice: 0454/324527
fax: 0454/323059
Charles Grimsdale is the Managing Director, and he does have a clue...
They have no net feed as of yet, but after talking to some of their
hardware magicians at SIGGRAPH '90, that will change soon.
The system that they had at SIGGRAPH was described as a cyberspace
server. If you know how Crays are used, that pretty much sums up
the client/server relationship. Basicly, their machine sits on a
network and just responds according to messages from the net. They
had a 486 to generate the messages (because that box was easier to ship
to Dallas). I do not know what operating system the 486 was running,
but possibly some unix -based os. They're willing to port to other
systems if the customer requires it.
The general design reminded me of a Sequent Symmetry which has up to
32 processors and lots of busses feeding into the system bus. This
allows separation of various i/o devices so you can increase
performance since you have more choices for locating fast and slow
devices. I do not know more of DIVISION's system other than that.
-Cowboy Dan
--
R+D Cowboys: HITL, Seattle CSL, U Delaware
Pezely@hitl.VRnet.washington.edu Pezely@udel.edu