Critics and purists may say that IBM Corp’s RS/6000 SP machines are no more than clustered RS/6000s, and that their massively parallel tag is a misnomer, but IBM takes the things very seriously, and adds to the line rather more frequently than it does with many of its more widely used offerings. This week the company added six mew SP models with 77MHz Wide Nodes – Thin Nodes are used for compute-intensive applications, Wide Nodes are more flexible in their expandability and are designed to be used as versatile servers. The new machines use the Power2 processor, and supplement the existing 66MHz Wide Node models, offering performance improvement of about 15% for technical computing applications, which is consistent with increasing the clock to 77MHz from 66MHz, with a little bit getting lost on the way. The new models are available as a two-node entry system consistent with the existing SPs, can have a mix of Wide and Thin Nodes, and are scalable to the full 128-node configuration. The new models are Model 205, with base 79 frame without High Performance Switch; Model 305, base 79 frame with High Performance Switch; Model 405, base 79 frame with Multi-Switch; Model 2A5, 49 frame without switch; Model 3A5, 49 frame with High Performance Switch-LC8; and Model 3B5, 79 frame with High Performance Switch-LC8. The company also now offers software pre-load services, Powerquery Solution support for AIX Version 4, memory exchange capabilities, and co-existence with SP1 models for the 205, 305 and 405, all from next month. The 205, 305, 405 and 3B5 start at $101,300 with $650 monthly maintenance but the prices exclude the switches; the 3A5 starts at $73,300.
