Henry Burkhardt’s Kendall Square Research Inc is planning to unveil its technical- and business-oriented massively parallel machine (CI No 1,813), in the spring. Called the KSR1, the machine is based on custom 64-bit processors, CMOS and has a multiple instruction multiple data architecture, although the system doesn’t require message-passing between processors, since it can be programmed like a shared-memory machine. Susan Parrish, vice president of corporate communications for the Waltham, Massachusetts-based company, explains that the machine’s memory architecture, called AllCache, delivers the conventional, sequentially-consistent shared memory programming model, but in a MIMD-style parallel system. The KSR1, she adds, is the first highly-parallel computer to deliver a mass storage subsystem that is a direct extension of memory; the AllCache memory capacity ranges from 256Mb to 35Gb, with virtual memory of 1 Terabyte per process. The machines can be configured with eight to 1,088 processors; these are grouped in multiples of 16, making for a scalable architecture. Input-output bandwidth ranges from 210Mbps to around 15Gbps; RAID disk capacity from 210Gb to 15.3Gb. According to the company, the KSR1’s peak performance ranges from 160 MIPS to 21,760 MIPS, 320 to 43,520 MFLOPS. The machine is designed to run under OSF/1-compatible Unix; software tool offerings include Cobol, Fortran and C, and Oracle Systems Corp’s Oracle database is expected shortly to be up and running on the machine. For interoperability, the parallel KSR1 supports TCP/IP, Network File System, Token Ring, SNA, Open Systems Interconnection, X25, open VMEbus-based interfaces, High Performance Parallel Interface and Fibre Distributed Data Interface. Kendall Square says the KSR1 is targeted at the technical supercomputing market. The machine’s three existing installations include two at US national laboratories and one at Manchester University in the UK. Manchester’s machine supports 3,000 users, and will be used as a time-sharing system on a bureau basis for industrial users. The KSR1 costs $1m for an entry-level configuration, and ranges up to $30m for a 1,000-processor machine. Kendall sees its closest competition as being traditional general-purpose technical vector supercomputer vendors Cray Research Inc and IBM Corp, though the Waltham company emphasises that its easy-to-program machines offer the high performance of massively parallel machines. The date of the formal launch of the KSR1 will be set when the Oracle implementation has been completed or when the start-up company has made its first commercial sale.
