An open meeting, attended by over 200 prospective users of the Cray X-MP/48 service, was held at the Imperial College of Science and Technology on Tuesday 8 July.
Professor A J Forty, who chaired the meeting, presented a summary of the present state of implementation of his Working Party's report on Future Facilities for Advanced Research Computing.
Other talks and speakers were:
The final item on the agenda was a Panel Discussion in which over two dozen questions were raised covering access to the Cray, Peer Review and the continuing arrangements at the Computer Board National Centres.
Further information on the topics covered by the first four talks will be given in a Cray Newsletter to be issued in the Autumn. Everyone who attended the open meeting will automatically be included in the distribution list. Anyone else who would like to be included on the circulation list should contact me.
Details of how to apply to SERC to use the X-MP/48 are given below.
The Cray computer to be housed in the Atlas Centre at the RAL will be part of the new national supercomputer organisation. A common procedure will be evolved to cover access to all the centres. Interim information is provided here for those users seeking early access to the Atlas Cray.
Applications for use of Atlas Centre Cray will be assessed in the main by the peer review bodies of the various Research Councils and the British Academy. In the case of SERC-funded users, applications will need to be made on a standard SERC Research Grant application form (RG2) and a Computing Resource form (AL54). Revised versions of both these forms are being introduced and will eventually be available from your local administration centre (RG2), or your local computing centre or the Atlas Centre (AL54). Your application will need to be certified by the director of your local computing centre. The application should be addressed to the appropriate Committee Secretariat at SERC Central Office, Swindon, where arrangements for peer review will be made. A copy of the AL54 form should be sent independently to Resource Management, Atlas Centre. RAL. These arrangements conform closely to present access arrangements to the Cray at ULCC via SERC Grants with the addition of the AL54 requirement.
In addition, there will be arrangements for pump priming applications - i.e. applications for small amounts of time from established users of RAL, ULCC and UMRCC who wish to try out the X-MP/48 in order to determine what resources to request in a subsequent grant application. Enquiries should be addressed to Resource Management at the Atlas Centre.
Computer Networks, both Wide Area and Local Area but especially Wide Area, have in the past been more concerned with the reliable delivery of data than in the promptness of its delivery or in its bandwidth. The computer traffic of the 1970s consisted mainly of text file transfers or in remote terminal logons, neither of which had any important real time constraints, but both required extreme reliability in the data.
In the last few years, however. considerable interest has been shown in integrated service networks which would provide the user with a wide variety of different services; voice, video, computer data, terminal access and so forth. This work is most advanced in the Integrated Service Digital Network recommendations of CCITT which will be implemented in Europe and in North America in the next few years. This will provide access to the digital trunk networks to subscribers and to Value Added Network providers.
In the field of distributed computing, loosely coupled operating systems have been making more use of single interaction protocols. In these protocols the request and its reply is the only connection which is ever made. This type of traffic has different network requirements from those of the connection-orientated file transfer or remote logon.
The feeling that a single integrated network could carry most digital services, has also had a direct effect on computer manufacturers and communications suppliers. with many commercial partnerships being formed The convergence of computing and communications is likely to be one of the important features of technology in the 1990s.
Several research groups in the UK: Cambridge University, Loughborough, Logica, Acorn, RAL and others, have been interested in various aspects of integrated. services for some time and earlier work in that area was covered in the UNIVERSE project.
In that project we were concerned in extending Local Area Network activities into a wider geographical context Two new traffic types, which were then not carried over wide area computer networks, were found to have particularly interesting features; these were distributed computing traffic and voice traffic.
The idea of carrying bulk: data, distributed computing traffic, voice and image over a single integrated network: leads to a set of requirements which are not covered by any single current network, either LAN or WAN.
Project UNISON is an attempt to build a research network which will support these requirements.
On a single site service traffic will be carried by both existing and new LANs. The connection-orientated traditional data and distributed computing traffic will be carried over current LANs and new services such as voice and video will be carried on a new 80 Mbps slotted ring, the Cambridge Fast Ring, CFR. A local exchange will interconnect these different services into a site wide network.
The exchange acts as a local backbone or spine network interconnecting a number of service LANs. The exchange does not have any hosts directly connected to it - service LANs are connected to the exchange via Portals. In our project the major service LANs will be 10 Mbps Cambridge Slotted Rings and IEEE802.3 Ethernets. The exchange will also interconnect 80 Mbps CFR LANs, where these will be service rings providing packet voice and image transfer.
A local exchange, based on a 80 Mbps slotted ring, forms the heart of the UNISON network. This ring, the Cambridge Fast Ring, has been jointly developed by the Cambridge Computing Laboratory and ACORN Computers Ltd. It has 16 bit address fields and a 256 bit data field. A chip set consisting of a ECL repeater and a CMOS station chip have been developed. The CMOS chip currently works at 60 Mbps and the ECL at 100 Mbps or more.
As well as provide high bandwidth, low delay local switching, UNISON exchanges can be interconnected together over wide area links. The most important of these links are the 2.048 Mbps PCM links used for digital voice transmission in Europe. These links are marketed in the UK as Mega stream.
The Alvey programme in the UK has commissioned the building of a pilot ISDN network, the ALVEY High Speed Network, which will use these links as the primary rate connection. These links will allow switching of data between sites using circuits established through the ISDN exchanges.
The intention of the UNISON project is to build a network which will test the practical aspects of a network for integrated services including distributed computing traffic.
As a former member of John Oldfield's Computer Aided Design Project at Edinburgh I was very interested in Bernard Loach's history of the Edinburgh DEC-10. The DEC-System 10 (or PDP-10 as it was then called) was not strictly to replace the Elliott 4120 (upgraded at some point to a 4130), which continued to be used by Professor Michie's group for several years afterwards, but was to replace the share of the 4100 which had been granted to John Oldfield under a previous SERC award, which had also funded a DEC PDP-7 with type 340 display. This was later connected by a custom-built. parallel link to the PDP-10, and was the focus for much of the early research on interactive graphics.
The impression might be gained from the second paragraph in Chapter 2 that accommodation in Buccleuch Place was converted for receipt of the PDP-10 in 3 weeks, which certainly would have been remarkable. In fact the machine was installed in an already existing prefabricated machine room in the car park behind Buccleuch Place, which had previously housed an English Electric KDF-9 belonging to the Edinburgh Regional Computer Centre.
Much of the early system support and development on the PDP-10 was done by Russell Cowe, who contributed a great deal both technically and personally to the successful exploitation of the machine. John Gray, who took over the CAD Project after John Oldfield moved to a chair at Swansea, is now a vice-president of European Silicon Structures (ES2) in Bracknell, and Bill Hay is vice-president of Abraxas International in Florida. John Oldfield, whose timely grant application initiated the saga, is now professor of electrical and electronic engineering at the University of Syracuse, New York State.
I believe that the arrival of the PDP-10, and its subsequent development and enhancement, acted as a major stimulus to computing, engineering and architectural research in Edinburgh, and I am glad that its history has been so carefully and sensitively recorded in Forum.
