Meiko Ltd has been hiding its light under a bushel ever since it first showed the Transputer-based Computing Surface at the Siggraph graphics exhibition in San Francisco back in 1985. The reason, according to Meiko’s David Alden, was that the product was then considered too dangerous for the general public – we needed to put in place the operating software and standard packages to make it ready to plug in and go. Nevertheless, the Bristol company has managed to accumulate an impressive 175 customers of the braver sort during the test marketing phase. On Friday it finally launched the Computing Surface officially, complete with a Unix-based operating system – we’re not deaf or IBM said Meiko co-founder and Transputer designer Miles Chesney – and a raft of engineering and geophysical packages to run on it. Typically, the Computing Surface will be used with an IBM, DEC VAX, Sun Microsystems or Prime Computer front-end, but can also be used as a server on a network, or can be installed on an add-on board inside the Sun. Configurations range from a few MFLOPS for a workstation accelerator up to multi-cabinet mainframe-sized machines with 1 GFLOPS of performance; a standard M40 configuration, described as mid-range, offers 150MFLOPS with 500Mb of semiconductor memory, disk, back-up device and software, is UKP400,000 – but Meiko, unhelpfully, doesn’t say how many of the T800 Transputers that includes. Customers include Rolls Royce, which claims to have achieved throughput equivalent to a Cray when simulating and visualising the design of turbine blades; British Telecom, De la Rue and Glaxo have also bought systems. But the most recent coup, revealed Chesney, was the supply of a $2m 250MFLOPS Surface to a major Japanese manufacturing company for an industial application – the name of the company was not revealed. Since the major component of a supercomputer consists of memory, declared Chesney, we’re sending it back there value added.
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