Following its agreement with Tandem Computers Inc (CI No 3,038) Pyramid Technology Corp says it has other technologies in its pipeline that it plans to plug straight into Tandem’s so-called system area network. They include a second generation of its Mips RISC-based symmetric multiprocessing Nile servers, now RM600s following parent Siemens Nixdorf Infomationssysteme AG’s naming convention, due early next year. The 24-way R10000-based RM600E will use the Mesh interconnect – the original Niles don’t – and provide a non-uniform memory access data model, but it’s not the distributed shared memory cache-coherent ccNUMA topology being used by Data General and others. Pyramid says that in those systems the failure of one processor brings the whole system down. Its NUMA work is designed to increase performance and reduce bus traffic. RM600Es will plug into the high-end Reliant RM1000 parallel server and forthcoming RM2000 which will supposedly house either Mips R10000s or PentiumPros. It will run the Reliant Unix combination of Pyramid DC/OSx and Siemens Nixdorf’s Sinix Unixes. Pyramid says it will continue to develop its clustering software which Santa Cruz Operation Inc is integrating into UnixWare and Gemini. Meantime, the PCI Bus, Scalable Coherent Interconnect chip that Dolphin Interconnect Solutions AS is building for the RM600 has already been pushed back to mid-1997.
