Sequent Computer Systems
More info
- Creator
- Casey Powell et al.
- Released
- 1983–1999
- Type
- Computer maker
- Successor
- IBM
The Oregon company that showed big servers could be built from lots of cheap microprocessors instead of one expensive one.
Founded in 1983 by Casey Powell and a group of engineers who had left Intel. The Balance line and its successor Symmetry tied together up to thirty-odd processors – first National Semiconductor 32032s, then Intel 386s – with shared memory and cache coherence. Its DYNIX operating system was a Unix that could run on all of them at once, which was unusual at the time.
The 1990s brought NUMA-Q, an early commercial NUMA machine. IBM bought the company in 1999. Its longest-lived legacy turned out to be a synchronisation technique: read-copy-update, developed for DYNIX/ptx and part of the Linux kernel since 2002.