IBM rolls out one of the worlds fastest supercomputers

Ed Scannell - November 14, 2002

IBM Corp. on Friday rolled out a Unix-based supercomputer capable of churning out up

to a half trillion operations a second and that will be aimed at applications involving

scientific and computing and business intelligence.

The eServer p655, a next generation version of IBMs Deep Blue supercomputer,

contains 128 Power4 processors in one rack, but is also available in either four- or

eight-processor building blocks, a company spokesperson said.

A single eServer p655 rack with 128 Power4 processors occupies only about one-sixth

the floor space of typical Itanium2 based-servers with the same number of processors,

company officials claimed.

Tomorrows innovations are rooted in the bedrock of supercomputing technologies, an

area where we can leverage decades of experience, said Adalio Sanchez, general

manager of IBM eServer pSeries. We think the eServer p655 is a significant

breakthrough for customers who really need massive power and scalability, he said.

In a related announcement, IBM said it is once again the leader in supercomputing,

according to the popular Top 500 List of Supercomputers. Big Blue has a total of 93,074

teraflops, or trillions of calculations per second, of power on the Top 500 List of

Supercomputers; that figure accounts for about 31 per cent of the total processing

power on the list. Hewlett Packard is second with 64,827.6 teraflops.

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Corporate users can cluster p655 systems using IBMs eServer Cluster 1600 in concert

with a high-performance switch. They can also define their own logical partitioning,

which afford them more flexibility. In addition, cluster system administration from a

single-control workstation can be added through IBMs cluster management software

series, company officials said.

The p655 runs both the AIX 5L operating system, including Version 5.1, and Linux.

The p655 carries a US$73,485 price tag and will be available in volume shipments

before the end of the year.

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