Pyramid Technology
Encyclopedia
Pyramid Technology Corporation was a computer
company that produced a number of RISC-based minicomputer
s at the upper end of the performance range. They also became the second company to ship a multiprocessor
Unix
system (branded OS/x), in 1985, which formed the basis of their product line into the early 1990s. Pyramid's OS/x was a dual-universe
Unix which supported programs and system calls from both 4.xBSD and AT&T's System V Unix.
In 1995 Pyramid was bought by Siemens AG
and merged into their Siemens Computer Systems US unit. In 1998 this unit was split, with the services side of the operation becoming Wincor Nixdorf
. In 1999 Siemens and Fujitsu
merged their computer operations to form Fujitsu Siemens Computers
, and finally Amdahl
was added to the mix in 2000.
Pyramid Technology was formed in 1981 by a number of ex-HP
employees, who were interested in building first-rate minicomputers based on RISC designs. Their first series was released in 1983 as the 90x, which used their custom 32-bit
scalar processor running at 8 MHz.
Although the architecture was marketed as a RISC machine, it was actually microprogrammed
. It used a "sliding window" register model based on the Berkeley RISC
processor, but memory access instructions had complex operation modes that could require many cycles to run. Many register-to-register scalar instructions were executed in a single machine cycle. Initially, floating point instructions were executed totally in microcode, although an optional floating point unit on a separate circuit board was released later. Microprogramming also allowed other non-RISC luxuries such as block move instructions.
Programs had access to 64 registers, and many instructions were triadic. Sixteen registers (registers 48 to 63) were referred to as "global registers" and they correspond to the registers of a typical CPU, in that they are static and always visible. The other 48 registers where actually the top of the subroutine stack. Thirty-two of them (0-31) were local registers for the current subroutine, and registers 32-47 were used to pass up to 16 parameters to the next subroutine called. During a subroutine call, the register stack moved up 32 words, so the caller's registers 32-47 became the called subroutines registers 0-15. The return instruction dropped the stack by 32 words so return parameters would be visible to the caller in registers 32-47. The stack cache held 16 levels in the CPU and stack overflow and underflow was automatically handled by the microcode of the CPU. The programming model had two stacks, one for the register stack, and one for subroutine local variables. One grew up from a designated address in the middle of the address space, and the other grew down from the top of the user mode address space.
The 90x could accommodate 4 memory boards, initially holding 1 MB each. This was considered to be a lot of memory at the time, but the RISC-like architecture resulted in bigger programs than earlier architectures so most machines were sold with the memory slots full. Fortunately, the 1MB memory boards had RAM in sockets, so they could be upgraded to 4MB units when bigger dynamic RAM devices became available shortly after the 90x's initial release.
The 90x competed with the Digital Equipment Corporation
VAX
11/780 which was the preferred platform for running Unix in the early 1980s. The 90x processor benchmarked at roughly twice the speed of the VAX, and sold for about half the price. Pyramid was gallantly assisted by DEC, which was reluctant to sell VAX machines without the VMS
operating system for which they charged a considerable amount of money. Many universities wanted to run Unix rather than VMS, so Pyramid's higher performance and lower price, coupled with artificial delivery delays or surcharges from DEC helped them to make the risky decision to buy from a new manufacturer.
One of its biggest advantages over the competition was its asynchronous serial port controller (the ITS or Intelligent Terminal Server) based on a 16-bit bit-slice processor. The ITS interfaced to 16 serial ports, and it could run them at very high speeds, using DMA to feed from daisy-chained output data blocks. A machine could have many ITS installed, each one with its own I/O processor. Other machines at the time (including the 11/780) required CPU intervention every few bytes for interactive users which added significantly to the system component of the CPU load. As a result, the 90x scored very well on benchmarks with a realistic amount of serial I/O.
The disk and magnetic tape controllers were actually 16 bit third-party Multibus
controllers fitted into a socket in a u-shaped bus-adapter board.
Most early systems were delivered with the 470MB Fujitsu Eagle
disk drive and a slot-loading reel-to-reel streaming tape drive.
The system also had an administrative processor (based on a Motorola 68000
) that loaded the microcode from an 8" floppy disk when the system was started. It was also able to run a suite of diagnostics over the system. It had a modem which allowed remote analysis by the manufacturer. The software run by the administrative processor was initially called the Totally Unrealistic Remote Diagnostic. This name was changed some years later.
A minimal system was delivered in a single 19" rack about 60" high with the card cage in the bottom, the disk drive in the middle, the tape drive above it, then the 2 inch high control panel with a floppy disk drive and ignition key on the top. This was considered very compact at the time. At least one machine in Australia spend six months installed in a retired outdoor lavatory with an air-conditioner replacing the louvered window and the system console terminal sitting on top of the cabinet. Administration tasks were performed al-fresco. The only indicator on the control panel was an 8 segment bar graph LED display that displayed average CPU usage when the machine was running and a "Zylon Eye" pattern when the machine stopped unexpectedly. The machine was low enough that the console (a monochrome asynchronous terminal) could rest on top.
The 90x was fairly quickly followed by the 98x which was identical except that the processor clock speed was increased to 10MHz.
In late 1985 they released their first SMP
system, the multi-processor 98x, running at 7 MHz. Several machines in the series were released, from the 1-CPU 9815 to the 4-CPU 9845, over a period of years from 1985 to 1987. The fully loaded 9845 ran at about 25 MIPS, a respectable figure for the era, but not competitive with high-end supercomputer
s.
Like many of the early multiprocessor vendors, Pyramid turned to "commodity" RISC CPUs when they started to become practical. Pyramid continued to use their own RISC design until the release of the MIServer S product line. Pyramid released a series of register window-based machines as a 9000 line follow on. These were known as the known as the MIServer starting in 1989. They supported up to ten CPUs of about 12 MIPS each. The MIServer was replaced in 1991/2 with MIServerT and later followed up with the MIServer S, Pyramid's first R3000
-based machine. The first machines in the series shipped with anywhere from 4 to 12 R3000s, with top-end performance around 140 MIPS. The MIServer was replaced in 1991/2 with the low-end 1–12-CPU MIServer S (aka S-series) and high-end 24-CPU MIServer ES, both running speed-bumped 33 MHz R3000's. The operating system for the MIPS based systems was DC/OSx
, a port of AT&T
System V Release 4
(SVR4).
The release of the 150 MHz 64-bit R4400
led to the 2–16-CPU Nile series in late 1993. With each CPU capable of 92 MIPS, the Nile systems were true supercomputers. Their last product, the Reliant RM 1000 known internally as the Meshine, was just coming to market when Siemens bought them. The RM1000 was a massive parallel processing (MPP) computer. Each node ran its own instance of Reliant UNIX called DC/OSx
. This system had a two-axis mesh architecture. The RM1000 used software called ICF to manage the cluster interconnects. ICF went on to provide the cluster foundation in the PrimeCluster HA software which is still developed and available from Fujitsu Siemens.
Each compute node in the mesh used a single MIPS R10000
CPU however enhancements to the RM1000 allowed for the NILE SMP machines to be included into the mesh as "fat" nodes. The compute nodes were physically installed in the HAAS-3 frames that shipped as drive arrays with the earlier Nile product. Each compute node controlled six SCSI disks as the primary controller and another six disks as a secondary controller. The frame with up to six compute nodes or four compute nodes and two Nile attach gateways was connected to neighboring frames with short ribbon cables. A HAAS-3 frame with compute nodes installed was called a cell. The cells locked together and could be stacked two high and end to end as far as space permitted. Four cells together were known as a ton and systems were referred to by the number of tons they contained. The largest mesh constructed at Pyramid was a test system containing 214 CPUs including four Nile SMP nodes.
Although the RM1000 was eventually discontinued and not replaced by Siemens, customers who had large installations such as a large UK telecommunications company took a long time to find suitable replacements for these massively parallel systems due to their massive I/O and computing capabilities.
Computer
A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...
company that produced a number of RISC-based minicomputer
Minicomputer
A minicomputer is a class of multi-user computers that lies in the middle range of the computing spectrum, in between the largest multi-user systems and the smallest single-user systems...
s at the upper end of the performance range. They also became the second company to ship a multiprocessor
Multiprocessor
Computer system having two or more processing units each sharing main memory and peripherals, in order to simultaneously process programs.Sometimes the term Multiprocessor is confused with the term Multiprocessing....
Unix
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
system (branded OS/x), in 1985, which formed the basis of their product line into the early 1990s. Pyramid's OS/x was a dual-universe
Universe (Unix)
In some versions of the Unix operating system, the term universe was used to denote some variant of the working environment. During the late 1980s, most commercial Unix variants were derived from either System V or BSD. Most versions provided both BSD and System V universes and allowed the user to...
Unix which supported programs and system calls from both 4.xBSD and AT&T's System V Unix.
In 1995 Pyramid was bought by Siemens AG
Siemens AG
Siemens AG is a German multinational conglomerate company headquartered in Munich, Germany. It is the largest Europe-based electronics and electrical engineering company....
and merged into their Siemens Computer Systems US unit. In 1998 this unit was split, with the services side of the operation becoming Wincor Nixdorf
Wincor Nixdorf
Wincor Nixdorf is a German corporation that provides retail and retail banking hardware, software, and services. Wincor Nixdorf is engaged primarily in the sale, manufacture, installation and service of self-service transaction systems , retail banking equipment, lottery terminals, postal...
. In 1999 Siemens and Fujitsu
Fujitsu
is a Japanese multinational information technology equipment and services company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. It is the world's third-largest IT services provider measured by revenues....
merged their computer operations to form Fujitsu Siemens Computers
Fujitsu Siemens Computers
Fujitsu Siemens Computers B.V. was a Japanese and German IT vendor. The company was founded in 1999 as a 50/50 joint venture between Fujitsu Limited of Japan and Siemens AG of Germany...
, and finally Amdahl
Amdahl Corporation
Amdahl Corporation is an information technology company which specializes in IBM mainframe-compatible computer products. Founded in 1970 by Dr. Gene Amdahl, a former IBM employee, it has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Fujitsu since 1997...
was added to the mix in 2000.
Pyramid Technology was formed in 1981 by a number of ex-HP
Hewlett-Packard
Hewlett-Packard Company or HP is an American multinational information technology corporation headquartered in Palo Alto, California, USA that provides products, technologies, softwares, solutions and services to consumers, small- and medium-sized businesses and large enterprises, including...
employees, who were interested in building first-rate minicomputers based on RISC designs. Their first series was released in 1983 as the 90x, which used their custom 32-bit
32-bit
The range of integer values that can be stored in 32 bits is 0 through 4,294,967,295. Hence, a processor with 32-bit memory addresses can directly access 4 GB of byte-addressable memory....
scalar processor running at 8 MHz.
Although the architecture was marketed as a RISC machine, it was actually microprogrammed
Microcode
Microcode is a layer of hardware-level instructions and/or data structures involved in the implementation of higher level machine code instructions in many computers and other processors; it resides in special high-speed memory and translates machine instructions into sequences of detailed...
. It used a "sliding window" register model based on the Berkeley RISC
Berkeley RISC
Berkeley RISC was one of two seminal research projects into RISC-based microprocessor design taking place under ARPA's VLSI project. RISC was led by David Patterson at the University of California, Berkeley between 1980 and 1984, while the other was taking place only a short drive away at Stanford...
processor, but memory access instructions had complex operation modes that could require many cycles to run. Many register-to-register scalar instructions were executed in a single machine cycle. Initially, floating point instructions were executed totally in microcode, although an optional floating point unit on a separate circuit board was released later. Microprogramming also allowed other non-RISC luxuries such as block move instructions.
Programs had access to 64 registers, and many instructions were triadic. Sixteen registers (registers 48 to 63) were referred to as "global registers" and they correspond to the registers of a typical CPU, in that they are static and always visible. The other 48 registers where actually the top of the subroutine stack. Thirty-two of them (0-31) were local registers for the current subroutine, and registers 32-47 were used to pass up to 16 parameters to the next subroutine called. During a subroutine call, the register stack moved up 32 words, so the caller's registers 32-47 became the called subroutines registers 0-15. The return instruction dropped the stack by 32 words so return parameters would be visible to the caller in registers 32-47. The stack cache held 16 levels in the CPU and stack overflow and underflow was automatically handled by the microcode of the CPU. The programming model had two stacks, one for the register stack, and one for subroutine local variables. One grew up from a designated address in the middle of the address space, and the other grew down from the top of the user mode address space.
The 90x could accommodate 4 memory boards, initially holding 1 MB each. This was considered to be a lot of memory at the time, but the RISC-like architecture resulted in bigger programs than earlier architectures so most machines were sold with the memory slots full. Fortunately, the 1MB memory boards had RAM in sockets, so they could be upgraded to 4MB units when bigger dynamic RAM devices became available shortly after the 90x's initial release.
The 90x competed with the Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...
VAX
VAX
VAX was an instruction set architecture developed by Digital Equipment Corporation in the mid-1970s. A 32-bit complex instruction set computer ISA, it was designed to extend or replace DEC's various Programmed Data Processor ISAs...
11/780 which was the preferred platform for running Unix in the early 1980s. The 90x processor benchmarked at roughly twice the speed of the VAX, and sold for about half the price. Pyramid was gallantly assisted by DEC, which was reluctant to sell VAX machines without the VMS
OpenVMS
OpenVMS , previously known as VAX-11/VMS, VAX/VMS or VMS, is a computer server operating system that runs on VAX, Alpha and Itanium-based families of computers. Contrary to what its name suggests, OpenVMS is not open source software; however, the source listings are available for purchase...
operating system for which they charged a considerable amount of money. Many universities wanted to run Unix rather than VMS, so Pyramid's higher performance and lower price, coupled with artificial delivery delays or surcharges from DEC helped them to make the risky decision to buy from a new manufacturer.
One of its biggest advantages over the competition was its asynchronous serial port controller (the ITS or Intelligent Terminal Server) based on a 16-bit bit-slice processor. The ITS interfaced to 16 serial ports, and it could run them at very high speeds, using DMA to feed from daisy-chained output data blocks. A machine could have many ITS installed, each one with its own I/O processor. Other machines at the time (including the 11/780) required CPU intervention every few bytes for interactive users which added significantly to the system component of the CPU load. As a result, the 90x scored very well on benchmarks with a realistic amount of serial I/O.
The disk and magnetic tape controllers were actually 16 bit third-party Multibus
Multibus
Multibus is a computer bus standard used in industrial systems. It was developed by Intel Corporation and was adopted as the IEEE 796 bus.The Multibus specification was important because it was a robust, well-thought out industry standard with a relatively large form factor so complex devices could...
controllers fitted into a socket in a u-shaped bus-adapter board.
Most early systems were delivered with the 470MB Fujitsu Eagle
Fujitsu Eagle
The Fujitsu M2351 "Eagle" was a hard disk drive with an SMD interface that was used on many servers in the mid-1980s. It offered an unformatted capacity of 470 MB in of 19-inch rack space, at a retail price of about US$10,000....
disk drive and a slot-loading reel-to-reel streaming tape drive.
The system also had an administrative processor (based on a Motorola 68000
Motorola 68000
The Motorola 68000 is a 16/32-bit CISC microprocessor core designed and marketed by Freescale Semiconductor...
) that loaded the microcode from an 8" floppy disk when the system was started. It was also able to run a suite of diagnostics over the system. It had a modem which allowed remote analysis by the manufacturer. The software run by the administrative processor was initially called the Totally Unrealistic Remote Diagnostic. This name was changed some years later.
A minimal system was delivered in a single 19" rack about 60" high with the card cage in the bottom, the disk drive in the middle, the tape drive above it, then the 2 inch high control panel with a floppy disk drive and ignition key on the top. This was considered very compact at the time. At least one machine in Australia spend six months installed in a retired outdoor lavatory with an air-conditioner replacing the louvered window and the system console terminal sitting on top of the cabinet. Administration tasks were performed al-fresco. The only indicator on the control panel was an 8 segment bar graph LED display that displayed average CPU usage when the machine was running and a "Zylon Eye" pattern when the machine stopped unexpectedly. The machine was low enough that the console (a monochrome asynchronous terminal) could rest on top.
The 90x was fairly quickly followed by the 98x which was identical except that the processor clock speed was increased to 10MHz.
In late 1985 they released their first SMP
Symmetric multiprocessing
In computing, symmetric multiprocessing involves a multiprocessor computer hardware architecture where two or more identical processors are connected to a single shared main memory and are controlled by a single OS instance. Most common multiprocessor systems today use an SMP architecture...
system, the multi-processor 98x, running at 7 MHz. Several machines in the series were released, from the 1-CPU 9815 to the 4-CPU 9845, over a period of years from 1985 to 1987. The fully loaded 9845 ran at about 25 MIPS, a respectable figure for the era, but not competitive with high-end supercomputer
Supercomputer
A supercomputer is a computer at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation.Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems including quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling A supercomputer is a...
s.
Like many of the early multiprocessor vendors, Pyramid turned to "commodity" RISC CPUs when they started to become practical. Pyramid continued to use their own RISC design until the release of the MIServer S product line. Pyramid released a series of register window-based machines as a 9000 line follow on. These were known as the known as the MIServer starting in 1989. They supported up to ten CPUs of about 12 MIPS each. The MIServer was replaced in 1991/2 with MIServerT and later followed up with the MIServer S, Pyramid's first R3000
R3000
The R3000 is a microprocessor chip set developed by MIPS Computer Systems that implemented the MIPS I instruction set architecture . Introduced in June 1988, it was the second MIPS implementation, succeeding the R2000 as the flagship MIPS microprocessor...
-based machine. The first machines in the series shipped with anywhere from 4 to 12 R3000s, with top-end performance around 140 MIPS. The MIServer was replaced in 1991/2 with the low-end 1–12-CPU MIServer S (aka S-series) and high-end 24-CPU MIServer ES, both running speed-bumped 33 MHz R3000's. The operating system for the MIPS based systems was DC/OSx
DC/OSx
DC/OSx was an operating system for MIPS based systems developed by Pyramid Technology. It ran on its Nile series of SMP machines and was a port of AT&T System V Release 4 . DC/OSx was the first SMP implementation on Unix System V Release 4...
, a port of AT&T
AT&T
AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications corporation headquartered in Whitacre Tower, Dallas, Texas, United States. It is the largest provider of mobile telephony and fixed telephony in the United States, and is also a provider of broadband and subscription television services...
System V Release 4
UNIX System V
Unix System V, commonly abbreviated SysV , is one of the first commercial versions of the Unix operating system. It was originally developed by American Telephone & Telegraph and first released in 1983. Four major versions of System V were released, termed Releases 1, 2, 3 and 4...
(SVR4).
The release of the 150 MHz 64-bit R4400
R4000
The R4000 is a microprocessor developed by MIPS Computer Systems that implemented the MIPS III instruction set architecture . Officially announced on 1 October 1991, it was one of the first 64-bit microprocessors and the first MIPS III implementation...
led to the 2–16-CPU Nile series in late 1993. With each CPU capable of 92 MIPS, the Nile systems were true supercomputers. Their last product, the Reliant RM 1000 known internally as the Meshine, was just coming to market when Siemens bought them. The RM1000 was a massive parallel processing (MPP) computer. Each node ran its own instance of Reliant UNIX called DC/OSx
DC/OSx
DC/OSx was an operating system for MIPS based systems developed by Pyramid Technology. It ran on its Nile series of SMP machines and was a port of AT&T System V Release 4 . DC/OSx was the first SMP implementation on Unix System V Release 4...
. This system had a two-axis mesh architecture. The RM1000 used software called ICF to manage the cluster interconnects. ICF went on to provide the cluster foundation in the PrimeCluster HA software which is still developed and available from Fujitsu Siemens.
Each compute node in the mesh used a single MIPS R10000
R10000
The R10000, code-named "T5", is a RISC microprocessor implementation of the MIPS IV instruction set architecture developed by MIPS Technologies, Inc. , then a division of Silicon Graphics, Inc. . The chief designers were Chris Rowen and Kenneth C. Yeager...
CPU however enhancements to the RM1000 allowed for the NILE SMP machines to be included into the mesh as "fat" nodes. The compute nodes were physically installed in the HAAS-3 frames that shipped as drive arrays with the earlier Nile product. Each compute node controlled six SCSI disks as the primary controller and another six disks as a secondary controller. The frame with up to six compute nodes or four compute nodes and two Nile attach gateways was connected to neighboring frames with short ribbon cables. A HAAS-3 frame with compute nodes installed was called a cell. The cells locked together and could be stacked two high and end to end as far as space permitted. Four cells together were known as a ton and systems were referred to by the number of tons they contained. The largest mesh constructed at Pyramid was a test system containing 214 CPUs including four Nile SMP nodes.
Although the RM1000 was eventually discontinued and not replaced by Siemens, customers who had large installations such as a large UK telecommunications company took a long time to find suitable replacements for these massively parallel systems due to their massive I/O and computing capabilities.
External links
- 1994 Annual Report (10-K) at the SEC's EDGAR Online web site