nCUBE

With its final generations of servers, nCUBE no longer designed custom microprocessors for machines, but used server-class chips manufactured by a third party in massively parallel hardware deployments, primarily for the purposes of on-demand video.

In 1994, Ronald Dilbeck became CEO and set nCUBE on a fast track to an initial public offering.

Dilbeck left and Ellison took over as acting CEO, redirecting the company to become Oracle's Network Computer division.

nCUBE deployed its first VOD video server in Dubai's Burj al-Arab hotel.

A separate lawsuit against SeaChange was filed by nCUBE in 2001 after it acquired the patents from Oracle's interactive television division.

nCUBE claimed that SeaChange's video server offering violated its VOD patent on delivery to set-top boxes.

[6] On the business front, the dot-com bubble burst and ensuing recession as well as lawsuits meant that nCUBE was not doing well.

[8] In January 2005, nCUBE was acquired by C-COR for approximately $89.5 million, with an SEC filing for the purchase in October 2004.

Each module ran a 200 KB microkernel called nCX, but the system now used a Sun Microsystems workstation as the front end and no longer needed the Host Controller.

In addition the nCX operating system, it also ran the SUNMOS lightweight kernel for research purposes.

A fully loaded nCUBE-3 machine can use up to 65,536 processors, for 3 million MIPS and 6.5 teraFLOPS; the maximum memory would be 65 TB, with a network I/O capability of 24 TB/second.

A microkernel was developed for the nCUBE-3 machine, but it was never completed, having been abandoned in favor of Plan 9's Transit operating system.

Each hub contained one hypercube node, one CPU, a pair of PCI buses, and up to 12 SCSI drives.

The nCUBE-5 was very similar to the n4 family but incorporated two hypercube nodes in each hub and only supported video streaming over Gigabit Ethernet.