Cray Research Inc, Minneapolis, Minnesota, is joining in the general industry push towards supporting interconnecting systems and has expanded its networking offerings with new file server software, a disk subsystem and networking software. The Unicos Storage System is a network storage management system providing access to large numbers of files that could be located on a variety of storage devices. Built into Cray’s Unix System V.3-based Unicos operating system, it can run on all Cray supercomputers and is claimed to transfer data up to four times faster than other servers. Multi-processing features, ANSI/IBM tape support, resource control and job scheduling have been added to Unicos, says Cray. With a system bandwidth that goes from 400Mb per second up to 3.2Gb per second, sustained disk and tape transfer rates are pegged respectively at 9.6Mb per second and 4.5Mb per second. The DS-41 Disk Subsystem can handle up to 19.6Gb of data, is scheduled availability this quarter, and can be daisy chained with other storage devices into a single channel on a Cray supercomputer. Cray has also announced OSI 1.0 support on all its systems – the US government is making Open Systems Interconnection protocols mandatory for all its computer system procurements from September. Also announced is HIPPI, a high-performance parallel interface for connecting Cray systems to peripheral devices at a rate of 100Mb per second which is similar to Cray’s own high-speed external communication channel – HSX – but is a standard channel conforming to the proposed HIPPI revision 7.0 US national standard; Fibre Distributed Data Interface – FDDI – support; and Network Monitor – an X Window application for network management and control.
