🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <515@ctycal.UUCP> ingoldsb@ctycal.UUCP (Terry Ingoldsby) writes:
>In article <13683@reed.UUCP>, mdr@reed.UUCP (Mike Rutenberg) writes:
>> Does anyone have *any* details of the architecture that they can talk about?
>
>Myrias is based in Edmonton Alberta.  They are real, and have a real
>(as in working) multiprocessor machine.  I believe the machine uses
>68030 processors. 
>-- 
>  Terry Ingoldsby                       ctycal!ingoldsb@calgary.UUCP
>  Land Information Systems                           or
>  The City of Calgary         ...{alberta,ubc-cs,utai}!calgary!ctycal!ingoldsb

The processors are 68020's.  They are going to 88000 and hope to ship mid '90.
The machine is hierarchical.  There are 4 processors on a board, with a full 
interconnect between these.  There are 16 boards in a card cage.  There are 
two busses that interconnect the boards.  Any board can use either bus.  
There are 5 serial com lines coming out of each cage, so they can be inter-
connected.  I think they've built a 512 proc. machine, but I might be wrong.
I believe the com lines are FDDI using the AMD chip set.  The number of lines
is determined by how many chips fit on a board.

It's a real machine.  They've sold some.  The software is more important than
the hardware since they're trying to build a programming paradigm that will be
both easy to use and easy to port.  They claim that converting old code takes
hours or days instead of months.  Basically anything that can be vectorized
on a Cray can be parallelized on the Myrias.  They downplay the issues of
interconnect performance (latency and bandwidth) more than they should (IMHO),
but for some applications it has great potential for scalability.  Like the
i860 Intel iSPC, the 88000 Myrias will have performance like a full-up Y-MP,
if you can get at it.

<dbs>

David B. Serafini				serafini@ralph.arc.nasa.gov
Rose Engineering and Research 
@NASA/Ames Research Center
MS 227-6
Moffett Field, CA 94035