MICROCOMPUTER WITH DISCONNECTED, OPEN, INDEPENDENT, BIMEMORY ARCHITECTURE, ALLOWING LARGE INTERACTING, INTERCONNECTED MULTI-MICROCOMPUTER PARALLEL SYSTEMS ACCOMMODATING MULTIPLE LEVELS OF PROGRAMMER DEFINED HIERARCHY
To demonstrate that none of the hundreds of presently known multiprocessor systems are "capable of mimicking human thinking" to the required degree, one only has to read what Digital Equipment Corporation executives said about their newest multiprocessor systems in the January 20, 1987 edition of the New York Times;
Digital to Offer Mainframes
System links VAX Units
Moving into the mainframe computer arena, the Digital Equipment Corporation will announce today a $2.5 million system that links four of its most powerful VAX computers into one, giving it the speed of some of I.B.M.'s largest systems. * * * *
"This is an alternative style of computing when compared to I.B.M.," said Rose Ann Giodan, vice president of information system marketing for Digital. "It is an integrated whole, all the way from a desktop, $5,000 computer to a mainframe."
The announcement today, at a news conference in New York, is expected to involve two new machines, the VAX 8974 and 8978. Both link VAX 8700 computers, the 8974 in a cluster of four processors, the 8978 in a cluster of eight.
Digital said the 8974 would be able to process about 27 million instructions a second, putting it in direct competition with the low end of I.B.M.'s System 3090 computers. The 8978 would run at about twice the rate.
Questions on Power
At the same time, some experts question whether the multiprocessing solution that Digital and other manufacturers have settled on will actually provide heavy-duty users with the power they need.
Four VAX's that are tied together do not process data more quickly than a single VAX -- indeed, to solve most tasks only one of the four processors is at work. But because the four processors can work simultaneously, sharing mass storage devices and other expensive peripherals, they can reduce the waiting time that any individual user or program spends waiting for a single processor to become free.
The clustered VAX computers accelerate an industry trend toward the combination of several processors in a single computer. But strictly speaking, the new VAX's are not "parallel processors" because their ability to divide a single problem and parcel it out to different processors is severely limited.
"That's a software problem that still requires some additional work," said F. Grant Saviers, Digital's vice president of storage systems. "Obviously, it's something we are working on intensely." * * *.
This article confirms several of the seven basic problems of present multiprocessor systems mentioned above.
First Problem - Note the two levels of hierarchy used with the five or nine interconnected processors involved. The VAX 8974 or the VAX 8978 are on one hierarchy level, and the clusters of four or eight VAX 8700 are on the second hierarchy level.
Second Problem - Note there is no indication that the four or eight VAX 8700 are flexibly connected to the VAX 8974 or VAX 8978 in the clusters. In other words, there is no indication that the field application system designers can arbitrarily change the mechanical interconnection arrangement of the four VAX 8700 computers or the eight VAX 8700 computers.
Third Problem - Note "strictly speaking, the new VAX's are not "parallel processors" because their ability to divide a single problem and parcel it out to different processors is severely limited."
Fourth Problem - Note there is no indication that one VAX 8700 processor can be individually powered off and removed from the other three or seven VAX 8700s in a system, without causing a failure of the logic of the other running programs in the system.
Fifth Problem - Note there is no indication that programmers and field application system designers have the ability to add a fifth or ninth VAX 8700 to the system, without causing a failure of the logic of the other running programs in the system.
Sixth Problem - Note to make a four processor multiprocessor system and an eight processor multiprocessor system, three different processors are needed. The VAX 8700, the VAX 8974 and the VAX 8978, instead of only one multiprocessor that can be interconnected into multiprocessor systems of two to over a thousand processors.
Seventh Problem - If the VAX 8974 and VAX 8978 are considered interconnecting circuits for interconnecting four and eight computers, then two different interconnecting circuits are required to interconnect four computers or eight computers.
Especially note that "some experts question whether the multiprocessing solution that Digital and other manufacturers have settled on will actually provide heavy-duty users with the power they need".
