OpenVMS 7.2-1H1 (codenamed Penguin)

A fairly anonymous hardware release (designated by the H), but was it. Compaq announced the Wildfire family of servers in 2000, supporting both Tru64 and OpenVMS. The key innovative technology of this hardware were the Quad Building Blocks (QBBs), 4 closely couple processors designed to improve speed for multi-processor applications; and they did perform well for applications that needed no more than 4 processors. The problem came when QBBs needed to communicate with each other, because communications between QBBs was nowhere near as fast as that inside the QBB. The net result was that applications using more than 4 processors slowed down, and that was a problem for some of the larger OpenVMS users.

Cut a long story short, Rich Marcello, who was VP of the OpenVMS group at the time, realised the problem early on and put an internal team together to fix the problem. So essentially the software guys had to fix the hardware’s short comings, and fix it they did. They made changes to the OS on a daily basis, testing each one overnight. At that time the OpenVMS team were renowned for the quality testing and control however this was quite a lengthy process for a new version of the OS, so to get round that obstacle the team designated the release as a hardware release, which meant a shorter testing cycle and therefore it could be released to customers in a timelier manner. The fixes worked and OpenVMS survived until the Marvel family of servers were released in 2003 (Mesh architecture, more dynamic than QBBs).

Little know fact. T4 (Tom’s Terrific Timeline Tool) was developed by Tom Cafarella for use by the team to test the performance of the new versions of 7.2-1H1.