MPP under attack from clusters and PVP

Bristol, 03 December 98 According to Compaq's European HPC marketing manager Martin Walker, clusters have the future and ISV's hold the key. Unix is the preferred system for HPC for years to come. European supercomputer vendor QSW has already installe 0.5 Tflop/s of computing power, and the SX success show viability of PVP machines, said NEC's European marketing manager Chriastian Lantwin.

Martin Walker recalled a recent survey amongst HPC centres. For the real HPC systems, 100% of them expect that Unix will remain the preferred operating system for the near future. For the software they use, 52% of the applications comes from ISV's, the remainder is developed in-house. Hence it is important for the hardware vendors to cooperate with ISVs.

According to Walker, the HPC system of the future will be a cluster of SMPs. The SMPs will be based on powerful processors. Compaq, in fact the old Digital branch, is following the route bottom up. In 1999 Walker expects Compaq to release a new clustering Switch based on QSW technology. In addition new system management software and a new processor will be released.

QSW, Quadrics Supercomputers World, is a Finmeccanica company. Finmeccanica is a large industrial complex in Italy which produces for instance helicopters, aircraft and spacecraft. QSW is part of the aerospace activities in the Alenia Spazio part of Finmeccanica.

According to Allesandro Bellini, his company has defined the following role for QSW in aerospace activities. The systems can be used for infrastructure, telecommunications, aeronautics, transportation and multinode navigation systems. Supercomputing will be first applied in aeronautics and later on in space activities.

Belini noted that QSW with head quarters in Bristol and plants and offices in Rome and Pisa, currently employs 50 people. The total power of all QSW systems installed is 0.5 Tflop/s, biggest installations are at INFN and ENEA in Italy, other installations are in France and Germany.

QSW concentrates on the network hardware to connect processors and SMP nodes. Nodes applied can be used from different vendors. QSW supports Compaq Alphaservers - 4 processor-node SMP support will be announced in the first quarter of 1999 and SUN enterprise servers, also with SMP support.

A whole range of applications will be supported by QSW systems, including numerical libraries like NAG and IMSL. Programming models supported include MPI and OpenMP.

QSW will market its systems as complete solutions but will also collaborate with Compaq providing the latter switch technology.

The most succesful Japanese supercomputer vendor outside Japan is NEC. As Christian Lantwin pointed out, over 120 SX-series machines with more than 900 CPU's are installed worldwide. The new SX-5 series provides single node shared memory peformance of 128 Gflop/s. A full-blown 32 node SX-5 can deliver 4 Tflop/s.

According to Lantwin, the SX is doing very well in for instance the European Aerospace industry. Dutch NLR and French ONERA have for instance ordered an SX-5. This is due to the high effeciency the system delivers on industrial codes and the easy programming model. Within one node, it is a simple shared memory machine which requires no extra parallelizaton effort from the programmer.

NEC is active in expanding its application port folio. Recently a strategic agreement with ESI was announced to offer Crash and Safety test simulation solutions on the SX-series.

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