At Esprit ’92 – an exhibition of European Community-funded information technology projects in Brussels last week – ICL Plc revealed that it will indeed use Cypress Semiconductor Corp’s 64-bit HyperSparc microprocessor for its SQL parallel database server engine (CI No 2,051). ICL’s Colin Skelton said Texas Instruments Inc’s failure to deliver a 40MHz SuperSparc CPU […]
At Esprit ’92 – an exhibition of European Community-funded information technology projects in Brussels last week – ICL Plc revealed that it will indeed use Cypress Semiconductor Corp’s 64-bit HyperSparc microprocessor for its SQL parallel database server engine (CI No 2,051). ICL’s Colin Skelton said Texas Instruments Inc’s failure to deliver a 40MHz SuperSparc CPU raised doubts about the validity of the architecture. A prototype of the database server was developed by ICL, Groupe Bull SA, Siemens Nixdorf Informationssyteme AG and associates under the European Community-backed Esprit II European Declarative System project. ICL claims Bull and Siemens Nixdorf are at least two or three years behind it with commercial Declarative System products. Bull, developing parallel Unix boxes with IBM Corp, says it may license technology it developed for the Declarative System project to IBM. With Declarative System funding due to end next year, ICL is lobbying the European Commission to extend financing for more software research until 1994. Half of ICL’s Declarative System research budget came from the Community’s Esprit purse. ICL’s corporate database server engine will come with up to 128 processor modules, each with two 60 MIPS HyperSparc CPUs – potentially running to 15,360 MIPS. The thing will be aimed at the corporate and commercial transaction processing markets and will run SQL relational databases like Oracle and Ingres when it comes to market in 1994 or 1995. The idea is to enable the server to be attached to host systems – Unix or proprietary – where it will function as a database subsystem accelerator. It will run the Chorus Systemes SA Chorus/Mix Unix System V.4 microkernel. A distributed European SQL interface, ESQL – an SQL extension developed under the Declarative System project – can exploit databases for use with parallel architectures. Software optimised to run on the system includes a database request manager, data manager, and Delta, a high-speed interconnect system. The request manager translates ESQL queries for parallel execution. The Delta network – developed by Siemens Nixdorf – is a 25M-bytes per second interconnect bus that distributes queries across the parallel modules. ICL is currently developing an interconnect to its DRS 6000s and is re-engineering its software tools to incorporate code parallelisation.
