Compaq's new 50 GFlop/s performance 32-Alpha SMP GS320 presented at SYSTEMSMunich 21 Oct 99
At the Compaq Booth at SYSTEMS Exhibition in Munich, surprisingly a machine was presented that has not been announced yet. Then GS320 consist of 32 Alpha processors with are clocked with 729 MHz. Thus a processor has a peak performance of nearly 1.5 GFlop/s. The 32-processor system sums up a total peak of approximately 50 GFlop/s. Compaq expects about 40 SPECInt and around 70 SPECFP per CPU.
The main memory is actually limited to 128 GByte that means 4 GByte per processor, a very high rate compared to other SMP systems. Next year, Compaq officials said, it will be extended to 256 GByte.
In the SMP system the processors are connected via a two-stage crossbar with a total of 50 GByte/s transfer rate, about 8 GB/s in the first level and 42 in the second level crossbar. The machine ist strong in I/O too, a total of 16 GB/s I/O bandwidth. 64 PCI busses with 256 MB/s each are available.
The GS320 runs TRU64 Unix and OpenVMS, a porting of Linux is still in discussion. Up to 8 Unix partitions can run in parallel. A mixed mode partitioning with TRU64 Unix and OpenVMS is possible.
It was mentioned that the Compaq Labs received one of the first GHz Alpha-processor from Samsung, the EV68. Probably the first systems with the EV68 will be shipped next year.
An other issue is the number of processors. One can expect the GS-series with an EV7 and 128 CPUs, but ith might be possible that this can be extended to 256 CPUs.
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