IBM Corp’s PowerParallel system announcement at the CeBit Hannover Fair was decidedly off-key last week, as the firm effectively previewed the systems without much substantive detail in Germany, intending to flesh the things out for the US press at UniForum this week. The original SP1 PowerParallel machine unveiled 13 months ago scaled up to 64 62.5MHz Power RISCs – the new systems will go to 128 Power or Power2s mixed as wide and thin nodes. Compute power for the SP2 will be twice the SP1’s 125 MFLOPS, the architecture supports four times its 40Mbps bandwidth and eight times the memory. As servers, the systems will connect to Escon, Token Ring, HIPPI, high performance subsystems adaptor, SCSI-2 fast/wide differential adapter/A and differential high performance external input-output controllers via new Micro Channel adaptors. Storage options include the 9333 drive, 7135 RAID, 9570 array and 3490 tape array for up to 31Tb. System software includes enhanced systems management, full versions of AIX on each node, a parallel development environment and 12 new applications including the Ingres database, SAP R/3 and Livermore Software’s car crash simulator, bringing total applications to 63. IBM showed a 16-way running DB2/6000 and CICS/6000 on eight nodes, and weather forecasting, the car crash simulator and fluid dynamics applications on the other eight; and a 12-way box with Oracle7 and SAP R/3. IBM says it has shipped over 80 SP1s worldwide, over half in Europe.
