Plunging parallel processing four-square into the commercial arena, Metier Management Systems Ltd, the British project management software specialist currently owned by Lockheed Corp, but up for sale, is to make its Artemis 8000 project management system available on Bolt, Beranek & Newman Inc’s new 88000-based TC2000 parallel processor, announced this week (CI No 1,222). Metier sees the TC2000 as a cost-effective platform with the computational power, memory and input-output capacity needed for handling very complex project-management applications. In construction management, it says, Artemis has been used by the US Bureau of Reclamation to manage over 50 supply and construction contracts for the Central Arizona Project to deliver water from the Colorado River to Phoenix and Tucson. The system involves over 24 users interacting with 40 separate databases of up to 20,000 records each and the Bureau claims the system has saved it $30m so far on scheduling construction of a pump-generator plant. The TC2000 runs the Berkeley Unix 4.3-based nX for software development concurrently with the pSOS+m kernel from Software Components Group Inc for multi-tasking execution. All the processors can share memory over the third-generation Butterfly switch at 38MHz per processor, and a software-controlled clustering option enables users to designate processor groups to run programs under either operating system simultaneously; there is also an Xtra X Window System-based programming environment has multiprocessing tools for development and to do performance analysis.
