Revealed: Open VMS Galaxy secrets

Wildfire will support 32 CPUs next year, 120 the year after

Details of the future of Open VMS Galaxy reveal that the OS will support next generation hardware in 1999 with future enhancements expected in the year 2000. According to US newsletter Shannon Knows Distributed Enterprise Computing, next year Open VMS Galaxy Phase II will include support for up to 32 processors (Wildfire), CPU hot swapping, the ability to dynamically add memory and up to eight OpenVMS instances. Currently, OpenVMS only allows three instances. And, according to editor Terry C. Shannon, OpenVMS will provide LAN over shared memory to increase performance and RAMdisk in shared memory. Shannon has also exclusively disclosed that in the year 2000, Galaxy Phase III will support industry standard platforms, exploit future Alpha chip and server platform design for what he described as an “order of magnitude performance improvement” using EV7 architecture and also support more than 32 processors, for between up to 72 and 120 microprocessors. This, effectively, will “lash together” multiple Wildfires using a peer to peer global port. Other improvements will include so-called “self healing” tools for memory re-configurations, and Distributed Lock Manager (DLM) data in shared memory. In Phase IV of Galaxy, for the years’ 2001 and beyond, Compaq-Digital is promising the ability to exploit technological advances in hardware as well as continued performance improvements. The Register wonders what Mr Grove and his Great Satanic chip band will make of all this… ® Information about Galaxy within this news piece is copyright Terry Shannon, and Shannon Knows Distributed Enterprise Computing