As expected (CI No 2,761), Digital Equipment Corp demonstrated the 100Mbps, 0.5 microsecond latency PCI bus Memory Channel interconnect from its Alpha RISC partner Encore Computer Corp at Supercomputing ’95 in San Diego. The company strung eight 12-way AlphaServer 8400s together in an array using the interconnect, claiming that the combination delivers some 57.6 GFLOPS at a cost of $4.5m. That buys the array, 4Gb of memory, 32Gb disk, the PCI bus Memory Channel interconnect, Digital Unix, HPF High-Performance Fortran, parallel software environment – the run-time code for HPF, and DEC’s Parallel Virtual Machine implementation. A dual processor AlphaServer 2000 with 256Mb main memory, 4Gb disk, the interconnect and software costs from $70,000.
