Re:Bet this is really Locus TNC (Score 1)

Bingo! Compaq's SSI technology dates back to a project at UCLA in the early 80s where Bruce Walker was working on his doctoral dissertation. Around '83, he started Locus Computing with Dr. Popek and others. Locus developed TNC, among various other projects.

I think it was during the 90s that Locus was bought by Platinum. A few years later, Computer Associates bought Platinum, but the SSI technology was sold to Tandem. It was around this time that the port began to UnixWare 2.1.

After Compaq bought Tandem, the SSI code was brought up to UnixWare 7.1 and released as NonStop Clusters for Unixware 7.1.0 in late '99. SCO sold it under their name and Compaq hoped to make money from increased sales of servers. Compaq retained ownership of the NSC code, of course.

It was around this time that I joined the development team. We went through a few more iterations on UnixWare, merging with the UW 7.1.1 code base, adding support for TCP/IP interconnects as an alternative to ServerNet, and fixing bugs.

Early in the year 2000, Bruce (my boss) decided that we should port NSC to Linux. Later that year, he and some other managers decided that we should also open-source the technology.

Now here we are halfway through 2001. We've cleaned up alot of the code (more important for open-source than proprietary), adapted much of it to the implementation of Linux, and just released a major piece (Cluster Infrastructure). Hopefully, an initial release of the full SSI code will be ready soon.

BTW, the article says that we're releasing the SSI code under Yet Another Open-Source Licence. There was some miscommunication here. We're releasing it under the plain vanilla GPL version 2.

Brian Watson
Linux Kernel Developer
SSI Clustering Laboratory
Compaq Computer