NCR 3700 - The Next-Generation Industrial Database Computer

Andrew Witkowski, Felipe Carifio, and Pekka Kostamaa NCR/Teradata Advanced Concepts Laboratory (TACL) 100 N. Sepulveda Blvd. El Segundo, CA 90245 Abstract The iVCR 3700 is our next-generation general purpose computer. Its design benefited from 10 years of Teradata DBC/1012 industrial experience, with which we hold a 70% market share in commercial VLDB applications. The NCR 3700 will be sold as a large parallel Unix system, and as a database computer. The NCR 3700 can run third party merchant databases, as well as the Teradata relational DBMS. Readers should keep in mind that all the &sign decisions assume VLDB (multi-terabyte) size applications. The NCR 3700 and the DBC/1012 have a close symbiotic relationship between the hardware and the software. The operating system and hardware contain features and extensions used by the database to exploit parallelism. This paper describes the NCR 3700 architecture, hardware capabilities, the BYNEITM interconnection network, the Unix/NS operating system, and the Teradata relational database. We describe our notion of a Trusted Parallel Applicafion (TPA) that runs under our extended Unix operating system, UnixINS. The most important TPA is the Teradata relational database. Real-world VLDB systems have difficult system administration problems. We conclude the paper by describing one of these problems, namely, the loading of massive amounts of data. The NCR 3700 computer and database software were designed to efficiently run new multi-terabyte level VLDB applications well into the 21st century.