IBM revises Numa policy

IBM is planning a strategy change with a launch of servers based on the Non Uniform Memory Architecture (Numa) parallel processing architecture, writes Jonathan Lambeth.

Until now, IBM has been sceptical that Numa, which shares memory across processors via a very fast interconnect,is a good way to increase the scalability of machines based on symmetric multiprocessing (SMP).

But Numa has proved successful for Sequent and Data General in the past year, particularly in the data warehousing and decision support markets.

A number of vendors are now looking to market Numa machines.

Hewlett-Packard is planning to introduce a Numa product by the end of the year, and Sequent and Data General have new products for release in the next six months. Sun is working on its own Numa variant, Coma.

?Without naming names, I think there are a lot of vendors, those who decried Numa to start with, who are going down the Numa route, certainly for part of their systems,? said Jane Doorly, vice president and UK director of research at Dataquest.

No one at IBM was available to comment, but executives inside the company said the Numa servers would form part of its RS/6000 Unix range.

IBM has had test models in labs, in conjunction with Groupe Bull, for some time and has demonstrated early product versions to a group of industry experts and customers.

One insider said that IBM has been advertising for experts to work on developing a Unix kernel for Numa machines in its RS/6000 division.

A Numa version of the RS/6000 could act as an alternative or even replacement for IBM?s high end Unix offering, the SP series, which uses a parallel processing architecture to scale to more than 100 processors.

? Report by VNU Newswire.