The so-called Cyberbricks project at Microsoft Corp – first mentioned here last September (CI No 2,752) is gradually moving out into the light of day, reports our sister publication Unigram.X. Cyberbricks is a research effort that aims to build superservers out of commodity hardware and software components, and is the pet project of Gordon Bell and Jim Gray, both now working at Microsoft’s San Francisco Research Labs. Dr Bell is, of course, the architect of the VAX, while database and transaction processing guru Gray, during a career spent at such companies as Digital Equipment Corp, Tandem Computers Inc, IBM Corp and AT&T Corp, has had a key role in the development of such high-profile systems as DB2, IMS, NonStop SQL and Rdb. Gray, whose title at Microsoft is senior database architect, has been talking about the project at various conferences recently. His main focus is on automatic parallelism and fault- tolerance within a Windows NT-based cluster. Now, everything is networked and everything is built from commodity components (both software and hardware), he explains in the abstract from one of his lectures: both clients and servers are built from the same commodity components – Cyberbricks. He goes on to predict that in the future, servers will be arrays of processors, storage and network components that provide automatic management, programming and parallelism. Meanwhile, the New York Times caught up with Gordon Bell last week in order to include him in a minicomputer pioneers article. Dr Bell told them his idea of scalable network and system computing will totally change the industry by the year 2002, and believes the new architecture will finally deliver to desktop users the equivalent power of a mainframe.
