RS/6000 SP System on top of TPC-H benchmark

The TPC-H benchmark was designed as a tool to evaluate real-world business intelligence performance. Because it places a focus on a system's ability to efficiently execute complex ad hoc queries, the benchmark becomes more difficult to run as the size of the database grows. IBM elected to run the benchmark test at one terabyte, the level most indicative of the massive amounts of data used in today's enterprise business intelligence applications.

In TPC-H benchmark testing at 1 terabyte, a 32-node RS/6000 SP system with IBM's DB2 Universal Database Version 7.1 and AIX Version 4.3.3, achieved a Composite Queries per-Hour rating of 12,866.8 QphH with a price performance of $670.

The RS/6000 SP in this benchmark used 4-way, 64-bit SMP nodes with the recently introduced copper-based Power3-II microprocessor running at 375 MHz and a Serial Storage Architecture (SSA) disk subsystem.