Despite its alliance with IBM Corp on the PowerPC, Hitachi Ltd is ploughing on with its work on the Hewlett-Packard Co Precision Architecture RISC – and in light of Hewlett’s alliance with Intel Corp, must be wondering whether it was wise to change horses at just the moment it did. In Japan, Hitachi last week […]
Despite its alliance with IBM Corp on the PowerPC, Hitachi Ltd is ploughing on with its work on the Hewlett-Packard Co Precision Architecture RISC – and in light of Hewlett’s alliance with Intel Corp, must be wondering whether it was wise to change horses at just the moment it did. In Japan, Hitachi last week launched its first parallel supercomputer, the SR2001, which has up to 128 Precision Architecture RISCs – no word on which iteration – and began taking orders for it on Thursday for delivery in March. It expects to get 100 of the things away over the next five years, despite the fact that it is committed to taking IBM’s SP-2 Powerparallel system as well. The SR2001 features a three-dimensional crossbar network switch running at 100Mbps – described as a super-high-speed concatenated communications function – to speed data transfer between processors. It runs Hitachi’s Mach-derived HI-UX/MPP and it uses Motif as the graphical user interface. Peak floating point performance is tagged at 23 GFLOPS. It includes a parallel applications development and support environment called ParallelWare, which comes from Pasadena, California-based Parasoft Corp, which calls the product Express in the US. Parasoft provides support for program development of message passing protocols, performance monitors, and symbolic debuggers and the company has a routine for catching bugs in parallel software automatically. Prices for an SR2001 with eight processors start at about $700,000 in the new deeply devalued dollars. Despite the SR2001, Hitachi was also reported last week as saying that it plans to develop its own parallel supercomputer using the PowerPC RISC, and that it will be enhancing the PowerPC to create a chip that can be the basis of a 1 TFLOPS machine, with a target launch date of 1996. Hitachi also hints that it may be able to persuade IBM to take the machine under an OEM pact.
