Data General's NUMA systems keep information moving at Bloomberg L.P.; NUMA architecture extends AViiON SMP performance to new heights.

WESTBORO, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 19, 1996--Data General's AViiON AV 10000 enterprise servers, the company's first systems based on the Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) architecture, have been delivering unprecedented power and performance scalability in the highly demanding production environment at Bloomberg L.P.

Bloomberg L.P. provides round-the-clock, real-time business and financial information via the Bloomberg terminal. Over 60,000 financial professionals and news organizations around the world depend on "The Bloomberg," for up-to-the-minute news as well as access to thousands of applications and vast warehouses of information to make critical real-time decisions that their businesses depend on.

"Our strategic advantage stems from our ability to move fast and deliver innovative products and services to our users before our competitors do," said Michael Bloomberg, founder and CEO of Bloomberg L.P. "Data General's new AViiON systems, with their high levels of power, performance, and availability, have enabled us to keep doing that very successfully."

Bob Ostrow, partner at Bloomberg L.P., adds, "The NUMA architecture implemented in the AV 10000 has enabled us to keep growing the installed base of Bloomberg terminals while maintaining the fast response time that our users require. We've seen dramatic improvements in performance running our current applications. Our 32-processor AV 10000 servers that we have in production provide more than twice the performance of the 16-processor AV 9500. With this performance boost, we will be able to provide a number of new applications and services for our users."

Bloomberg L.P. uses more than 70 AViiON servers, including more than 20 AV 10000 systems. More than 6 Terabytes of data is stored in Data General's fault-tolerant CLARiiON disk arrays connected to clusters of AViiON servers.

"The success of the AV 10000 systems at Bloomberg's highly demanding production environment provides proof of concept for our approach to NUMA," commented David Ellenberger, vice president of corporate marketing for Data General. "NUMA extends high-end SMP performance to large processor counts while not requiring complex and costly application rewrites as does MPP. We are applying the same NUMA principles to our next generation of high-end systems which will be based on Intel SHV (Standard High Volume) servers." (An SHV server is a complete SMP-ready computer system including quad Pentium Pro processors, built-in cache, memory, and I/O.)

Data General's implementation of the NUMA architecture in the AV 10000 server breaks the performance bottleneck in high-end symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) systems by minimizing memory and I/O traffic on the system bus through a number of hardware nad software innovations. This enables the AV 10000 to scale at near full efficiency, providing near-linear performance increases at CPUs are added.

A number of design similarities in the AV 10000 quad-processor boards and the Intel SHV baseboard has given Data General a head start in developing system software to run not only the AV 10000, but also future NUMA systems. Data General's DG/UX software, recognized as the best SMP UNIX operating system, incorporates multi-threading and fine-grained locking to ensure that processes can be separated, scheduled, and executed on any available processor. At the same time, optimized routines for memory allocation, process scheduling, and process execution (so-called "affinity scheduling" algorithms) ensure that any memory accesses and I/O functions are performed as near as possible to the processor where tasks are being carried out.

On the hardware side, there are two local PCI I/O buses on each quad-processor board of the AV 10000. I/O throughput increases as system boards are added, up to a sustained rate of 400 MB/sec on 32-processor systems. These buses support the NUMA architecture by providing fast data transfers to buffers in local memory without system bus contention and allowing interrupts to be distributed across multiple system boards, eliminating a bottleneck found in many other SMP designs.

About Data General

Data General (NYSE:DGN) provides servers, storage systems, and services to information technology users worldwide. The company, with headquarters in Westboro, Mass., reported revenues of $1.2 billion in fiscal 1995. Additional information on the company, its products, and services is available on the Internet at http://www.dg.com.

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AViiON and CLARiiON are registered trademarks of Data General Corp.

All other brand and product names appearing in this press release may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

CONTACT: Data General,

Carlos Soares, 508/898-6674

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Data General,

Jim Dunlap, 508/898-6546

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