Silicon Graphics Inc has made good on its promise of delivering Origin 2000 servers that use NUMA clustering to gang up 256 processors into a single system image. SGI says that the new Origin 2000, which uses the 300MHz MIPS R12000 processor and can have up to 512Gb of memory, is more than four times faster than current SMP servers from its competitors (Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard). A 256-processor machine with 128Gb of memory achieved a SPECfp_rate95 rating of 63,676. A prototype 256- processor Origin 2000 using the earlier 250MHz R10000 processors got a 41,014 rating on the SPECfp_rate95 test. A 64-way Sun Starfire server got a rating of 11,908 on the test, about the same as a 64-way SGI Origin 2000 using the 250MHz R10000 chips.
The only machine that comes close to SGI on the SPECfp_rate95 test is an IBM RS/6000 SP with 192 160MHz Power2SC processors, which got a rating of 36,224 on the test back in February 1998. Since that time, IBM has shipped significantly more powerful dual Power3 SP nodes, which haven’t been tested. The HP V2500s are conspicuously absent from the SPECfp_rate95 tests, too. An AlphaServer cluster with 96 612MHz Alpha 21164 processors had a ranking of 10,426 on the test when it went through its paces in January 1998. SGI didn’t provide Linpack benchmark specs for the new Origin NUMA server, but based on specs for Origins using the same MIPS processors (but fewer of them) it looks like the 256- processor NUMA box should have a peak theoretical power of about 150Gflops. After degradation from NUMA latencies and various overhead, the machine probably does about a 40% of that or 60Gflops if SGI’s SMP ratios on 16-way Origins are any guide to how larger NUMA servers degrade.
