Compaq's Alpha series devised from outside in

By MICHAEL FOREMAN

Compaq is not a name that most people would associate with supercomputers but the term does justice to the power of the company's AlphaServer GS series.

Launched in New Zealand last month, the Alpha architecture is based on building blocks of up to four EV67 processors.

While each processor is rated at 731MHz - a speed that would hardly raise eyebrows on a PC - the key to performance lies in the ease with which multiple building blocks can be connected together.

Last week the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Centre in the United States announced it would use 682 such Alpha building blocks, or a total of 2728 processors, to achieve six teraflops or six trillion operations a second.

But while the Pittsburgh installation will be worth $US36 million ($78.2 million), a single AlphaServer starts at less than $200,000, an entry-point which will see Alphas competing with systems based on Intel's forthcoming Itanium.

"It's the only processor that not only keeps up with Intel's architecture but stays ahead of it," says Jesse Lipcon, Compaq vice-president of Alpha Technology.

"We've got two further generations mapped out and we are thinking about the one beyond that."

The EV67 Alpha is available now. The E7 and E8 upgrades can be retrofitted to today's servers, resulting in a twenty-fold performance increase.

Mr Lipcon, who is based in Boston, attended the Alpha's New Zealand launch in Queenstown as the "godfather" of the Alpha architecture.

He said that the complexity of a processor that currently included 15 million transistors and would use 250 million with the EV8 had "long since passed the point where one person can keep it in [his or her] head."

"The Alpha was designed by a team of several hundred people. Obviously there are leaders but no one person understands the whole thing."

"We like to work from the outside in - we look at target markets and applications and we work out what we need on the chip to run those systems. The CPU and system designers were more or less locked in a room to figure out what system functions were wanted, then they worked back to achieve it."

The Alpha was born when Digital, which has since been acquired by Compaq, needed to find a replacement for both its VAX minicomputer running VMS and the MIPS architecture running Unix. Alphas now support any mixture of OpenVMS, Tru64 Unix, or Linux.

Multiple operating systems run simultaneously and if one application crashes it will not bring the whole system down.

"The main benefit is server consolidation, you could replace lots of smaller servers on one machine."

Another advantage is that the Alpha can run several versions of the same operating system, which is useful for doing development on the latest version 5.1 say, while working applications are still running on a previous version.

Mr Lipcon says Linux is supported as part of a "big brother, little brother" strategy.

"A customer can start out with Linux and slide right up into Tru64 and it flows the other way - ISVs (independent software vendors) know that by writing for Tru64 they can also target the Linux market."

But one operating system that is no longer supported by Alpha is Windows 2000. Mr Lipcon said the decision to drop NT as it was then known was made a year ago to focus the Alpha platform as an enterprise scale system.

While the Alpha is likely to figure strongly in Compaq's server sales globally - president Michael Capellas predicted $US1 billion worth of Alpha shipments this year - a shortage of the large-scale telcos, financial and e-commerce customers that the Alpha is aimed at may mean the Alpha's share of the local server market, estimated by IDC to be worth $131 million last year, may be more modest.