GP7000F - the new workhorse from Fujitsu Siemens

Munich 04 Apr 00 Although VPP supercomputers and hpcLine parallel machines catch a lot of attention, even in HPC, much work is done on workstations and small servers. The GP7000F is Fujitsu Siemens' work horse for these cases. The company offers a broad spectrum, starting with the models 200 (275 MHz, 4 MB 2nd level cache, up to 2 CPUs, up to 4 GB memory), 400 (300 MHz, 8 MB 2nd level cache, up to 4 CPUs, up to 8 GB) and 600 (the same as model 400 but up to 8 CPUs). The models 1000 and 2000 use 330 MHz SPARC64-GP chips, 8 MB 2nd level cache and up to 64 GB memory (64-way interleaved) with 6 to 32 processors (mod. 1000) and 8 to 64 CPUs in up to two cabinets (mod. 2000). The highend systems have internal disk space up to 1 TB and external up to 700 TB. The memory crossbar has a bandwidth of 40.96 GB/s (51.2 GB/s for the coming 128 processor system). The operating system is SUN Microsystem's Solaris, identically running on SUN SPARC-servers.

The system can be partitioned into 4, 8 or 15 partitions, which run independently from each other. The performance is, following Fujitsu Siemens officials, about 10 to 20% better than the comparable Sparc chip running at the same clock frequency from Sun, e.g. because of the out of order execution and the bigger cache.

High Availability

This is a major issue, error correction codes for all data paths, memory and 1st and 2nd level cache, power on self test, automatic system reconfiguration for CPU, memory and PCI bus as well as hardware diagnostics. It is possible to have a hot pluggable system boards, hot replacement of CPUs, memory and PCI controller. This allows a 99.999% availability. Thus this system can also be used in business critical environments.

Roadmap of GF7000F and SPARC64 chip

The small system up to 8 processors are already available, the 32/64 processor machines will be delivered in the 2nd quarter of 2000. The next step is a 128 processor node in 4 cabinets, which is scheduled for 4th quarter of 2000.

End of this year or a bit earlier a 500 MHz processor in 0.18 micron technology is available, 600 MHz and the 1 GHz are planned. Actually Fujitsu Siemens use 128 MB memory modules, in the 2nd quarter 256 MB modules and end of this year 512 MB modules will be available.

The actual chips perform maximum 3 floating operations per cycle, the 1 GHz processor will perform up to 4.

Usage in the HPC environment

The GF7000F can be used as a large and fast I/O file server but also as a HPC machine. All the tools available in Solaris can be used on this machine. The Fujitsu compilers will incorporate sequential processing, MPI, automatic parallelisation and OpenMP (the latter two in beginning of 2001). All the experiences gained in the VPP compiler and tools technology will be incorporated in the GP7000F HPC software environment.

 

Uwe Harms

[News on Advanced IT]   [Calendar]   [Analysis]   [IT in Medicine]