Pyramid Technology

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Pyramid Technology was a computer company that produced a number of RISC-based minicomputers 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 3 MHz.

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 supercomputers.

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 processor of the day was the MIPS R3000, . The first machines in the series shipped with anywhere from 4 to 12 R3000's, 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 an MPP Parallel computing machine with each node running its own instance of Reliant Unix called DCosx. This system had a 2 axis mesh architecture. The software used 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 6 SCSI disks as the primary controller and another 6 disks as a secondary controller. The frame with up two 6 compute nodes or 4 compute nodes and 2 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 2 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 4 Nile SMP nodes.

Although the RM1000 was eventually dropped and not replaced by Siemens, those customers who had large implementations such as a large UK telecomms company took a long time to find suitable replacements for these hugely parallel systems due to the massive IO and computing capabilities.