IBM's next generation supercomputer powered by copper chipsSan Diego 09 Feb 00"The computing capability of the new IBM SP will open up new avenues for scientific discovery," said Sid Karin, director of SDSC. "With simulations on a scale never before possible, this system will allow researchers to better understand the workings of the human nervous system, design the next generation of drugs against HIV and other diseases, and tackle complex issues of climate and the environment." Thanks to its copper-based POWER3-II processors, the new nodes introduced today for the RS/6000 SP offer superior commercial and technical performance. An SP configured with 64 POWER3-II processors almost doubles the floating-point performance of similarly-configured Sun E10000 and SGI/Cray Origin 2000 computers, according to the SPECfp_rate95 benchmark, IBM says. Floating-point calculations are critical to technical applications, such as seismic/petroleum exploration, aircraft design analysis, weather forecasting and computational fluid dynamics. The new SP also surpasses the Sun Ultra E10000 and SGI/Cray Origin 2000 in the SPECint_rate95 commercial performance benchmark. The RS/6000 SP system is increasingly being used for a variety of commercial applications. The new POWER3-II node is expected to continue that trend. Starting at $46,650, the node has superior price-performance, making it especially attractive to mid-sized companies seeking to deploy business intelligence, enterprise resource planning and server consolidation applications. The new SP node is based on the 64-bit, 375 MHz POWER3-II microprocessor, a RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) chip developed for IBM's RS/6000 servers and workstations. Although aimed at applications such as the analysis and simulation programs used by aerospace, automobile and drug manufacturers, the chip is also optimized for data intensive applications like data mining. A single POWER3-II chip -- about the size of a thumbnail -- contains a quarter mile of copper wiring. The SP is a highly-scalable system made up of building blocks called nodes. An SP system can consist of just one or two nodes all the way up to hundreds of nodes. The system's performance scales almost linearly with its size. Each node contains one or more microprocessors and its own random access memory (RAM) and disk storage. IBM sells several types of nodes that can be mixed in one system and used together for large computing jobs, or separately for smaller tasks. As of December 31, 1999, IBM had shipped more than 8,200 SP systems with more than 86,000 nodes in the six-and-a-half years since the SP system was introduced. More than 1 million IBM RS/6000 systems have been shipped to over 125,000 commercial and technical customers around the world.
[News on Advanced IT] [Calendar] [Analysis] [IT in Medicine] |
|