The massively parallel processing market remains a struggle for all its players, but Sunnyvale, California-based MasPar Computer Corp is hoping to give its machines a new edge in the market by packaging them up with an integrated relational database management system optimised for large-scale decision support applications in an open data warehouse environment and offering the hardware-softeware combination as the MasPar Decision Series. The package comprises the computer, Decision DB software, and RAID-5 disk array. The database uses a proprietary Power Index to compute joins, range selects, and scalar aggregates: the technology is based on research initially funded by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the US National Science Foundation. Indexes are created on join conditions and other frequently-used attributes of selection, but are based on domains across tables, rather than on single tables. The optimiser can also have the system create additional indexes on the fly. The Decision Series is based on ANSI ’89 SQL and Microsoft Corp’s Open Database Connectivity definition of Core SQL Grammar. The Decision Series starts at 1,024 processors delivering 4,250 MIPS, going to 16,384 processors for a claimed 68,000 MIPS with from 20Gb to 4Tb of disk. Prices start at $630,000 with 20Gb of RAID-5 disk. The first beta installation goes in this month and availability is set for March.
