Unisys Corp is pitching its high-end Cellular MultiProcessing server design as an enterprise Windows NT product which uses commodity Intel components and includes advanced functions such as eight-way dynamic partitioning inherited from its mainframe heritage (CI No 3,409). But at the heart of the CMP system is a new four-in four-out port non-blocking cross-bar interconnect and chipset claimed to provide throughput of 20Gbps internally that can connect any processor with every other processor in the system and is capable of supporting Unix, the MCP/AS and OS2200 mainframe operating systems as well as NT. Unisys is now ‘bes’ friends’ with Microsoft and is pushing NT as its preferred system software environment over Unix and its mainframe products. It admits CMP is effectively a next-generation of its existing multi-operating system ClearPath HMP Pentium Pro server design re-architected for Intel’s next-generation Pentium II Xeon and Merced processors. ClearPath, now dubbed Aquanta XR/6 houses up to 12 Intel CPUs running on Unisys’s 533Mbps Scalable Coherent Memory (SCuM) bus and will superseded by CMP. Unisys had planned to run its mainframe operating systems on Intel nodes within ClearPath but doesn’t appear to have delivered this functionality yet. The fully-fledged 32-way CMP will support 32Gb RAM. Microsoft says it’s working with Unisys to change or extend NT’s hardware abstraction layer to scale to 32 processors and support the in-system dynamic partitioning of processors, memory, application migration functions and other features Unisys is integrating into the system. CMP will be available from the beginning of 1999 as a four-way system running NT or UnixWare. A technology package will be available for OEMs and Unisys will also certify other Unixes such as Solaris x86 to run on CMP, although it will leave that kind of packaging to OEMs. Versions of CMP cut specifically to support the mainframe operating systems will follow. Clustering of partitioned processors can be achieved internally through CMP’s shared everything memory or multiple systems can be connected using conventional Wolfpack or UnixWare clustering techniques.
