IBMSMP: IBM pSeries with 8 Power4 processors

Overview

This computer, operated at LRZ between 2002 and 2006, served commercial AIX-applications as well as serial or parallel programs with high memory requirements. The platform served also as a successor of memory-server-nodes, formally accessable at IBM-SP2.

Hardware details:

Peak performance: 42 GFlop/s

Number of CPUs: 8 (Power 4)

Main memory: 32 GByte

Disk space: 936 GByte

Charakteristik:

Shared memory
Many commercial applications, libraries and tools
Parallization via message passing: MPI, PVM and other libraries
Parallization via OpenMP or automatically by the compiler

Fields of application:

Parallel programs (MPI or shared memory)
Many commercial applications

Hardware and Operating Environment

For computing tasks with very high memory requirements and for running commercial applications not available for other LRZ platforms an 8-way IBM p690 "Regatta " Symmetric Multiprocessor is now available. It contains eight Power 4 processors running at 1.3 GHz; Peak performance per processor is 5.2 GFlop/s, hence that of the complete machine is 41.6 GFlop/s, of which presently 75-80 % can be obtained for optimally tuned code. For production code the usual efficiency will probably be around 15 %. All processors are equipped with 32 kB 1st level data cache and 1440 kB 2-nd level cache. The 8 processors share 256 MB of Level 3 cache;

The machine has a memory capacity of 32 GB; batch jobs as well as interactive programs will run simultaneously.

The machine will be run under AIX 5.1.

For more details and internas of the IBM Regatta p690 see:
IBM's Technical Overview