NEW HEAVY DUTY UNIX-SERVER IBM
IBM has announced a new heavy-duty server p655, which will go on sale in December of this year. A key feature of the new supercomputer is a dense packing of components that provides compact server. In a single rack can be mounted to one hundred twenty-eight 64-bit Power4.
Peak performance PC up to 500 gigaflops (billion floating-point operations per second) per rack. Thus, on the basis of p655 can create supercomputers decent presence in the famous list of TOP500, a new version of which appeared a few days ago. Especially high performance can be obtained by combining multiple rack p655 in a cluster. The new super-server has a modular design and can be built on the basis of multi-chip blocks (MCM) with four Power4 processor with a frequency of 1.25 GHz or eight chips with a frequency of 1.1 GHz. Each multichip module includes a 128 MB cache in the third level of error correction.
The RAM can be from 4 to 32 GB. In addition, the server can be installed two hard drives with interface Ultra3 SCSI bus slots and three PCI-X. After an additional module IO 7040-61D, you can connect up to twenty additional PCI slots and up to sixteen hard drive with the ability to hot swap them.
IBM reports that p655 is the result of further development of the ideas embodied in the computer Deep Blue, in his time who beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov. The main advantages of the new IBM calls outstanding performance combined with a compact computer. For example, HP rx5670 server 128 to organize Intel Itanium processors 2 are six struts, whereas p655 for the same number of chips, only one rack.
In this four-p655 modification provides 15% more performance than the four-processor HP rx5670.
The basic version of p655, complete with four processors, will be sold for 72,449 dollars. The operating system used by AIX 5.1, and in the near future, scheduled to release a special version of Linux.
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