Compaq's Alphas in the technical market - IDC study

IDC study HPCT (High Performance Technical Computing) Market in Europe

Dr. Harald Meier-Fritsch discussed the results of some IDC studies. The first concerned the HPTC application areas with systems > 100 000 US$ in Europe. Apart the defense area Germany has about 1/3 of it, the figures are Mio. US$:

Applications	1998	1999	2000
Research/Academia	398	431	436
Engineering	388	436	478
Defense	166	202	228
Bio-Chemistry	137	164	187
total Europe	1.448	1.650	1.799

Technical Server and Systems in different segments worldwide, 1998 and preliminary 1999 in Mio US$

	1998	1999	growth in %
Capability	833	930	11.6
Enterprise	247	355	43.7
Divisional	1.810	1.840	1.6
Departmental	2.021	2.640	30.7
Total	4.911	5.765	17.4

Divisional and Departmental segments sum up to 3 quarter of the total HPC market. IDc expects in 2000 a growth of 12%, resulting in 6.5 billion US$.

IDC listed the vendor shares 1999 (5.765 Mio US$):

vendor	capability	enterprise	Divisional	Departmental
	(930 Mio)	(355 Mio)	(1.840 Mio)	(2.640 Mio US$)
IBM	31%	8%	12%	14%
Fujitsu	21%	6%
NEC	20%
SGI	16%	17%	28%	7%
Hitachi	7%
Compaq	5%	21%	30%	23%
SUN		37%	7%	17%
Hewlett-Packard		11%	21%	34%
other			2%	5%

In an IDC Flash - January 2000 the vendors, their market share and the growth is liisted:

vendor	market share	growth
HP	23%	+ 1 point
Compaq	22%	+3
SGI	16%	-4
IBM	16%	-3
SUN	12%	+-0

HPTC is, following Meier-Fritsch, an important and strategic sales field. Compaq will participate in the next ASCI computer project, the 30 TFlop/s machine's call for tender. A five TFlop/s machine with a single system image will consist of 128 SMP nodes with 32 processors each - 4096 EV67, 729 MHz.

Benchmark comparison, Compaq AlphaServer SC versus IBM SP

Meier-Fritsch presented Patrick Worley's benchmarking results - slides, which have been discussed at the ACM Supercomputing Conference 2000 on May 10th. Worley belongs to the Computer Science and Mathematics Division of Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL).

ORNL uses an IBM SP, 4-way Winterhawk II thin nodes with 2 GB memory and 375 MHz Power 3-II processors (1.5 GFlop/s) and 1.6 GB/s node memory bandwidth. The system consists of 176 compute nodes (704 processors) with a peak of 1.056 TFlop/s and a Linpack speed of 723 GFlop/s.

The Compaq AlphaServer SC has 4-way ES40 nodes with 2 GB memory and 667 MHz Alpha EV67 processors. The nodes are connected via a fat treee Quadrics interconnect. The system was installed in April 2000 and has a peak performance of 342 GFlop/s and a Linpack speed of 245 GFlop/s.

Both systems have similarities, 4-way nodes, nearly similar peak performance per processor, programming models, MPI, OpenMP, native one-sided communication library, IBM LAPI, Compa Shmem/Elan.

In the spectral dynamics application the IBM delivered in the 16th layer (level) a 4-way node performance of about 220 MFlop/s/processor while the AlphaServer SC had about 320 MFlop/s/processor. The Column physics was taken from the Community Climate Model. Even in this case the SC was faster.

Meier-Fritsch presented the summary of that talk, the Compaq system performance is better than that of the IBM and will likely scale better.