GOULD <GLD> INTRODUCES NEW MINI SUPERCOMPUTERS
Gould Inc said it is introducing a new
generation of very high performance mini supercomputers for
intensive engineering applications.
    Called the NPL, the mini supercomputers use Gould's UTX/32
operating system, which is a compatible multi-processor
extension of the UNIX operating system consisting of complete
AT and T System V and Berkeley BSD 4.3 environments, company
officials said at a teleconference.
    "The introduction of the NPL family of mini supercomputers,
is by far Gould's most significant computer line developed to
date," chairman James McDonald said.
    Patrick Rickard, computer systems president, said that he
expects sales of NPL family computers to account for 20 pct of
the division's revenues for the first year after its
introduction, and increase to 80 pct of revenues in five years.
    Computer operations accounted for one third or about 300
mln dlrs of Gould's total revenues for 1986 of 908.8 mln dlrs,
a company spokesman said.
    The NP1, the first series of the new family, uses an open
systems architecture, including parallel and high speed vector
processing and "massive" memory to achieve its supercomputing
capability, Gould officers said.
    The NP1 family will form the foundation for new systems
which are expected to be brought to market through the 1990s,
McDonald said.
    The computers are expected to have applications in science
and engineering, in aerospace and defense and extend into other
areas such as medical sciences, Rick Baron, senior director of
marketing development said.
    Gould said it priced and packaged the NP1 at a cost which
will provide the power and advantages of a traditional
supercomputer at a fraction of the cost.
    The NP1 product line includes several models priced from
395,000 dlrs to 2.9 mln dlrs, Gould officials said adding that
the company has already signed orders for eight NP1 systems.
    The low-end NP1 models will be available in the 1987 third
quarter and the high-end will be available in the 1988 first
quarter, they said.
    According to Gould officials, the NP1 cost 50 mln dlrs to
develop and the company plans to spend between 100 to 150 mln
to develop the rest of the family line. Between now and 1995,
the company expects to ship two to three billion dlrs of NP1
mini supercomputers.
    Offering up to 96 mln Whetstone instructions per second and
320 mln floating point operations per second, the largest of
the new systems, Model 480, incorporates up to four billion
bytes of physical memory, they said.
    The NP1 family has connectability but not compatability
with IBM and Xerox computers, a company spokesman said.
 Reuter
