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DEC readies High-end OS Digital sees new Galaxies in high-end computing By W. David Gardner, EE Times Maynard, Mass. -- The pioneer of computer clustering, Digital Equipment Corp., claims it is in the early stages of systems-software work that could lead to a new way of building high-end computer systems. While few details about the project--dubbed Galaxies Software Architecture--are available, one engineer involved in it suggested the work could open up a new debate in computer architectures. The heart of the effort appears to be a new capability for launching multiple instances of an operating system that work cooperatively as if part of a single computer, an approach that Digital's engineers call Adaptive Partitioned Multi-Processing (APMP). The technique could create a bridge between two classes of high-end systems: those that use a shared-memory approach to create a single system image across multiple processors, and those that take a shared-nothing approach to building computers that link a number of autonomous processing nodes via message-passing software. Digital is not releasing details about Galaxies, in part because the company says the project is still 12 to 18 months away from launching a product. However, one Digital engineer agreed to provide a sketch of the effort, which he said involves "brain surgery on the operating system." The result, he said, was "the next thing beyond clustering." "We've got something new," said Stephen Zalewski, a software engineer in Digital's OpenVMS systems-software group, which is designing Galaxies. "Galaxies is not just an incremental upgrade to clustering. It's the next computing model," comparing Digital's APMP concept to other computer architectures including symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) and NUMA (non-uniform memory access). Part of the motivation behind Galaxies, Zalewski said, was to find a bridge between today's architecturally diverse systems, some of which share memory among processors and others that pass data between distributed systems. "We wanted to find a way for the end user to run all these models with one solution," says Zalewski. "Galaxies is our way of responding." The first incarnation of the Galaxies architecture will be under the OpenVMS operating system on Digital's Alpha-based systems. But Zalewski said the underlying concepts are network- and hardware-neutral and could be applied to other vendors' systems. "Initially Galaxies will be for OpenVMS, but it's not necessarily just wedded to OpenVMS," Zalewski said. Terry C. Shannon, editor of the newsletter Shannon Knows DEC, said there was a buzz about Galaxies at Digital's recent annual user convention in Cincinnati, where the company disclosed some of its work to a small group of customers under a non-disclosure agreement. However, despite the backroom briefings, even some major Digital customers have only a sketchy picture of Galaxies, and conflicting information is beginning to spread by word of mouth and on Internet newsgroups. Only a few details of the Galaxies software have emerged so far. For instance, it will at least support basic features like load balancing across distributed systems. An internal Digital document says that "OpenVMS APMP can load-balance the resources among the partitions in real time." Processor, memory or I/O cards could be plugged into or pulled out of a Galaxies-based computer without rebooting. Reportedly, all partitions in a Galaxies system will be able to share memory with a command database as well as cache memory. "This evolutionary way of using multiple CPUs enables users to partition a single stem into multiple SMP nodes," said Shannon. Shannon estimated that Galaxies will support a single system of up to 256 CPUs, 1 terabyte of physical memory and up to 500 I/O ports, to deliver 1 million transactions per second. Sources at Digital say there is no real limit to the number of nodes that can operate under Galaxies. The most obvious applications would be supporting large databases for data mining, data warehousing or transaction processing. Zalewski suggested that the Galaxies architecture might some day even have a role in low-end systems. Word of Digital's efforts to propel itself into the forefront of high-end business computing come none too soon. Although Digital led the industry in rolling out ways of interconnecting individual systems into high-end clusters, competitors have been encroaching. In a recent review of cluster computing, research firm Technology Business Research Inc. (Hampton, N.H.) examined various features including scalability, availability, configuration flexibility, connectivity and applications support. The survey concluded that Digital's OpenVMS clusters still lead over products from Hewlett-Packard, IBM, NCR and Sun Microsystems. "If you look at history, Digital has had the clustering expertise," said Jim Garden, director of technical services at TBR, "but either the company didn't market properly or the market wasn't ready. Now the market is ready for cluster computing, but Digital has slipped from the No. 2 spot in computing to the No. 9 spot." Microsoft Corp.'s cluster technology for Windows NT, called Wolfpack, is expected to ship in an early-release version later this year. However, the software is still in its formative stages and currently only addresses availability issues across a small number of systems. As NT grows in prowess, major OpenVMS users, such as Knight-Ridder MediaStream (Philadelphia), are planning to run VMS under Windows NT. Rob Young, a technical-support manager at Knight-Ridder, said the integration of NT management and tool-set products into OpenVMS and Galaxies will take place gradually over several years. Digital's strategy is to co-opt the trend toward Windows NT by developing leading-edge connectivity products for the Microsoft environment while continuing to roll out proprietary products based on OpenVMS and Alpha with high-end capabilities beyond what Windows can offer. One Digital customer who has been following its cluster efforts closely is Rob Young, also a technical-support manager at Knight-Ridder MediaStream. "My interpretation is that reliability and scalability will go through the roof [with Galaxies]," said Young. "It's a real high-end thing. You should be able to get a huge boost just by getting Galaxies software. The performance-improvement jump should be as high as 10 times." "Galaxies is original," said Zalewski. "There are lots of papers on clustering, but nothing on Galaxies. [However] one of the beauties of Galaxies is that it won't be hard to understand." (Next article.)
[This article comes from EE Times in a joint cooperative effort with the Motley Fool. For more articles like it, please look at Fool's Gold every weekend or simply go to the Fool's Gold Mine and page through our back issues, which all have clever and cool EE Times articles in them.]
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