JimP <[email protected]> writes:
> Interesting. The main contractor told us it was due to the teraflops
> it could do, a YMP-2. I worked for a sub-contractor.

IBM Kingston supposedly had the responsibility for doing new
supercomputer ... also was providing to Chen's endevor (responsible for
both xmp & ymp)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Chen_%28computer_engineer%29

we were doing cluster scaleup as part of HA/CMP ... past posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp

then end of Oct91, the senior executive backing Kingston effort retires
and there is audit of all his projects. After that they start scouring
the company looking for high performance technology.

Jan1992 meeting in ellison's conference room about (commerical)
cluster HA/CMP scaleup
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13

mainframe DB2 complaining if we were allowed to go ahead, it would be
years ahead of them. Then cluster scaleup is transferred, announced as
supercomputer (for technical & scientific *ONLY*) and we were told that
we can't work on anything with more than four processors (which
motivates us to leave). Somewhat no brainer operations ... it takes care
of the DB2 complaints and also gets them their supercomputer ... old
email about working on technical and scientific with national labs and
others (up until the transfer)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#medusa

17Feb1992 press, scientific and technical *ONLY*
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001n.html#6000clusters1
05May1992 press, total surprise about national lab interest
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001n.html#6000clusters2

I would claim that (national lab) scientific & technical activity traces
back to at least getting roped into doing LLNL benchmark looking at
getting 70 4341s for computer farm and RDBMS/commercial dates back to
BofA getting 60 4341s for branch office distributed System/R (original
relational/sql implementation).

Note that IBM's RDBMS were mainframe only and so RS/6000 had to work
with other RDBMS for their platform. It turns out that a couple of those
vendors had same source base for both VMS cluster as well as open
systems. Part of simplifying the HA/CMP cluster scaleup was providing
interface that supported VMS cluster semantics. These RDBMS vendors also
had some very strong feeling about some of the VMS cluster
implementation that could be done much better (which I was able to take
advantage of besides my experience doing mainframe tightly-coupled and
loosely-coupled implementations).

Later in the 90s, Chen is CTO at Sequent and we do some consulting work
for him (before IBM buys Sequent and shuts it down).

-- 
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

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