Existing products to converge in Scalable Node 2

by Barry Sharp

. Steve OberlinThe future is surely a subject that all sites have an interest in, and Steve Oberlin, vice president of Hardware Engineering at Cray Research, certainly gave us lots to think about in his "New Hardware Report."

Steve outlined and refined the product roadmap as given to us at the North Carolina Cray User Group meeting in October 1996. This roadmap shows all existing products converging to a single platform known as Scalable Node 2 (SN2).

A new piece of information was released in this presentation that made mention of SN2v. SN2v will contain vector architecture, which many industrial, university, and government sites have been asking for. Also, SN2v single CPU performance will be greater than the T90P single CPU--some sources indicated twice the performance! (The T90P is the follow-on product to the T90.)

As best I could fathom, SN2 will likely be available in 2002. That's only four to five years ahead! In order for SGI/Cray Research to achieve this, they have to do many things that will be affecting us.

For example, the UNICOS, UNICOS/mk, UNICOS Max, and IRIX operating systems will be merged to a single operating system; namely, Cellular IRIX. Cray recognizes that this will mean their customers have to migrate from their current systems to the Cellular IRIX system, and that this will not be a transparent process.

To help with this transition, they will be porting many UNICOS features to Cellular IRIX by the end of 1998, and will be providing migration aids and tools in the UNICOS 11 release. No mention was made as to when UNICOS 11 would be released. However, if I were to guess, I'd say by 2Q99.

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SN2 will be source-code compatible with all previous products; code simply needs recompiling and reloading! This was a change from six months ago when SGI/Cray Research said at the North Carolina CUG that a cross-pollenation of software features between UNICOS and IRIX would be attempted.

The direction now is to port only from UNICOS to IRIX; a ll the arrows are now going one way. The IRIX XFS will not be ported to UNICOS as a supported UNICOS feature; apparently, too much work and poor performance--a real disappointment for some sites, I understand.

Some UNICOS features (mentioned as being "high-end" features) stated as being earmarked for porting to Cellular IRIX were:

  • UNICOS API and commands
  • Synchronized and political scheduling
  • Accounting
  • Checkpoint/restart
  • Multi-Level Security (MLS)
  • User Database (UDB)
  • Job support concepts
  • Process and job limits
  • System monitoring
  • Data Migration Facility (DMF)
  • Cray tapes
  • FFIO libraries
  • NQE/NQS
  • DCE/DFS
  • Cray ReelLibrarian
  • Asynchronous I/O, listio

All of this for a 12/98 release--they have lots to do. And so do we, if we wish to influence SGI/Cray Research with their early designs of these "high-end" features. It was strongly suggested that SGI/Cray involve the customer (i.e., CUG member sites) during these design phases. Involvement means actively approaching sites by visiting them and soliciting their inputs and suggestions. By collaborating in this manner, we all win.

As the pace of change is likely to pick up over the next several years, some CUG members are feeling nervous about only having one CUG per year.

I came away from the San Jose CUG feeling that the SGI/Cray folks have made great strides in getting their act together. Their attitudes were very much more upbeat and positive as compared to last October in North Carolina. The SGI/Cray merger appears to be working for them.

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