Thinking Machines Corp, the Cambridge, Massachusetts massively parallel systems pioneer, has launched new entry-level models in its Sparc-based CM-5 family. The new CM-5 Scale 3 systems offer peak performance of 4 GFLOPS and disk capacity of 16Gb, running under the CMost implementation of Sun Microsystems Inc’s SunOS Unix, at prices starting under $1m. The first machines are already in at Columbia University in New York City and at the Bergische Universitt in Wuppertal. The company highlights the fact that the Scale 3 systems use all three major mass-market off the shelf components – Sparc microprocessors, 3.5 disk drives and merchant memory chips. The machines come with up to 32 of the company’s 128 MFLOPS parallel processing nodes and two 8Gb disk storage nodes, each having eight 3.5 drives mounted on circuit boards. The entire system is integrated into a striking new cabinet designed by architect Maya Lyn, who did the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. As well as the new CM-5 Scale 3, the company announced a new file server architecture that again integrates file storage directly into the scalable network of CM-5 processing nodes, and claims that when 9.6Gb parallel disk storage nodes are plugged into the network, using RAID 3 technology, it provides a file server with performance comparable to solid state secondary storage – now. A system with 384 disk nodes stores 3Tb and transfers data at 4G-bytes per second.
