Offering further evidence that Unix will eventually supersede proprietary mainframe and supercomputer environments as the high- water mark in data processing, Silicon Graphics Inc is boiling down its Cray vector processing, MPP and SMP architectures into a hardware topology that will run a single Irix-based operating system. The hardware, which will be available after 2000, is the point at which SGI’s next-generation Origin SMP and vector processor systems – respectively known as SN1 supernode and SV1 supervector – converge. SN2 and SV2 will incorporate distributed shared memory, clustering, vector processing and massively parallel features drawn from all of SGI’s server products. Initially designed for the MIPS RISC and future versions of its CMOS vector processor SGI’s hardware will eventually support the 64-bit Intel Corp CPUs it has said it will migrate to over time. SGI says SN2 and SV2 will be different cuts of the same hardware running a common Irix Unix operating system drawn from the existing Irix system software, features from the Cray Unicos parallel vector and Unicos MK MPP operating systems plus additional features of the Stanford University Dash system software project which informs the current Cellular Irix 6.5 release. SGI says 6.5 has only implemented the infrastructure of Dash and that there’s a slew of distributed file system, HPC, dynamic configuration, single system image, clustering and enterprise technologies which will be fed into Irix from next year on. The company says it will cut full-function versions of Irix for its various hardware configurations and that the full code set will also be migrated to Intel. It says developers will be able to write a single version of a program that will execute on any of its Irix hardware platforms. As a first step SGI is creating a Supercomputing API including PVM, MPI, OpenMP and other programming libraries for writing Fortran, C and C++ applications that run across all of its high-end systems. A full version of the API is due next year. Additional Unicos interfaces and functions will be ported to Irix. As SGI rolls out its first NT systems this year, beginning with the ‘Borgs,’ it says it will develop a suite of add-on connectivity tools that will enable users to create mixed Irix/NT environments and write applications that can be deployed across both.
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