IBM POWER Parallel Systems Working With Oracle Corporation

ORLANDO, Fla., Sept. 28, 1993 IBM's POWER Parallel Systems organization [ http://ibm.tc.cornell.edu/ibm/pps/ibmpps.html ] today announced that they are working with leading commercial software vendor Oracle Corporation to make commercial applications available on IBM POWERparallel systems.

With commercial applications available on the IBM POWERparallel system, such as database and on-line transaction processing, commercial customers will take advantage of the price/performance leadership of RISC-based parallel systems to access and manipulate massive amounts of data and inexpensively solve complex business problems.

"Our intention to port Oracle-based applications to the POWERparallel system is a natural extension of parallel processing technology from the scientific and technical environment into data-intensive and commercial computing," said Irving Wladawsky-Berger [ http://ibm.tc.cornell.edu/ibm/people/gif/irving.gif ], General Manager, IBM POWER Parallel Systems. "We offer not only a strategic direction, but also demonstrate a successful example for commercial customers interested in the power of RISC-based parallel computing at an affordable price."

With the introduction of this commercial capability, customers are able to take advantage of the most scalable processing power in the industry, extending from the IBM RISC System/6000* family through the POWERparallel line of parallel computers.

Extending commercial capability to the POWERparallel system is part of IBM's strategy, announced last February, for bringing the power of parallel computing to its customers. The strategy also includes development of IBM System/390* commercial parallel processors.

Technology Demonstration

"As part of our massively parallel RDBMS development, we have focused efforts on IBM's POWERparallel system. We are enthusiastic about the high potential of using IBM's parallel architecture with ORACLE7 to address complex, mission critical business problems," commented James Sha, Oracle Vice-President for the Unix Strategic Business Unit. "Oracle is the leader in relational database management systems for massively parallel machines. We have invested a great deal of time and effort in developing software for this exciting technology."

Oracle Corporation's ORACLE7 Parallel Server for the IBM Scalable POWERparallel Systems 9076 SP1* is a unique technology which enables the ORACLE7 Relational Database Management System to run on multiple nodes of the POWERparallel system. Applications running on separate processor nodes can execute transactions against a common database.

The ORACLE7 Parallel Server POWERparallel system technology demonstration will simulate access of banking information and related activities. The demonstration will illustrate interactive user transaction throughput as multiple nodes are joined into the transaction processing. The demonstration will also graphically display transaction rates over time.

A trader on Wall Street, for example, could use the POWERparallel system to solve various problems simultaneously, using part of its computing capability for serial processing to pull up a customer profile, while extracting data from the market and running various investment scenarios using a simulation program in parallel mode. With the real-time results, the trader can offer customers more accurate predictions of market activity.