Alliant Computer Systems Corp, Littleton, Massachusetts has confirmed that, as expected (CI No 1,274), it is switching furture models of its FX series of minisupercomputers over to Intel Corp’s 80860 RISC processor and says that Intel’s $3m investment in Alliant will buy it a 4% stake in the form of newly issued shares (CI No 1,272). The two also announced that they are working on an Application Binary Interface – ABI – and Application Programming Interface – API – for the 80860 that will enable shrink-wrapped software written to the interfaces to run on any single and parallel, multi-processor systems built upon the RISC architecture, without the need for source code recompilation. It goes beyond the existing, basic ABI specification for 80860 systems running Unix System V/i860, and is being called the Parallel Architecture Extensions standard or PAX. Seventeen software houses have already signed to develop applications based upon it, including Oracle Corp, Pixar Inc, Visual Edge Software, The CAD Group and Kuck and Associates. Intel says it will incorporate the PAX standard in future generations of the 80860 architecture, the first implementation of which is promised for early next year. In addition to an ABI and API, PAX covers hardware, operating systems, libraries (for integer, graphics and floating point), and compilers. Alliant’s contribution to PAX is software in the form of its concurrency control architecture, parallelising Fortran and C compilers and parallel PHIGS and PHIGS
