http://www.hp.com/pressrel/18mar96f.htm (PC Press Internet CD, 03/1996)
Palo Alto, California. March 18, 1996
Hewlett-Packard Company today introduced the Exemplar SPP1600 (Scalable Parallel Processor), a new high-end technical system that delivers up to a 60 percent increase in applications performance over the previous model, the SPP1200. In performance benchmark tests, the SPP1600 has shown increases of 66 percent on SPECint95rate and 50 percent on Linpack 1000. This new system offers high-performance capabilities for a range of applications, including mechanical and electrical design; petroleum research and exploration; seismic processing; and university, scientific and biomedical research.
In addition to delivering significant speedup and reduced time to solution on leading applications, the SPP1600 offers customers the industry's top integrated storage management solution. No other vendor offers a single, scalable solution with the following combination:
Scalable Storage Management for the SPP1600 and K-class servers delivers integrated, scalable data- and file-management capabilities that are unmatched in the industry. Scalable Storage Management solutions enable users to implement enterprisewide hierarchical storage management (HSM), workstation and server backup and virtual-disk-management functions.
"Within three months of acquiring Convex for its supercomputing expertise, HP is setting new standards for what customers should expect from a high-performance supplier," said Paul Bemis, marketing manager for technical servers at HP's Workstation Systems Division. "The SPP1600 represents a new class of solutions that combine competitively priced application performance and complete storage-management capabilities."
"With the SPP as the high-end technical server, HP offers the only technical product line that is binary-compatible and scalable from desktop to supercomputer, while retaining the ease-of-programming features of SMP systems, " said Steven J. Wallach, chief technology officer at HP's Convex Technology Center.
Users can easily configure SPP1600 systems to support both high-bandwidth technical applications and storage-management tasks. Through the use of an innovative subcomplex manager, available only on HP's SPP systems, users can automatically reconfigure CPU resources to meet dynamic computing requirements.
The subcomplex manager allows the system administrator to graphically view SPP processor and memory resources and to change configurations on-line. With the subcomplex manager, administrators can subdivide processors into multiple, logical SMP systems that work independently. For example, a system can be configured to run a compute-intensive electronic design application simultaneously with complex data/file management tasks -- or, a system may be entirely dedicated to HSM.
The new SPP1600 features, combined with the 64-bit features of SPP-UX, such as file systems and files up to 1 Terabyte, provide a superior platform for technical applications and for reliable, scalable storage management.
The SPP1600 features a four-times-larger processor cache than the SPP1200 and enhanced I/O and operating-system capabilities for powerful performance increases, while maintaining compatibility with both HP-UX(1) desktop applications and previous Exemplar models. The SPP1600 architecture groups PA-RISC(2) processors, memory and I/O components into subunits, called hypernodes, with the result being a balanced approach to scalability.
"We find that the Exemplar is a strong performer," said George Lake, professor of astronomy, University of Washington in Seattle. "Each node runs our code at nearly twice the speed of an IBM SP2 node and more than three times the speed of a Cray T3D. Our kernal hits nearly 3 gigaflops (1 GFLOPS = 1 billion floating-point instructions per second) on 24 nodes, with a sustained rate for the full code of 2.1 gigaflops. This is nearly 10 times the flop rate that we achieved on the Cray C90." Dr. Lake is a principle investigator for the Grand Challenge program being conducted at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), University of Illinois at Champaign.
The SPP1600 I/O subsystem, based on the industry-standard PCI bus, provides significantly higher I/O throughput, allowing scalable access to external devices. It also enables multiple network connections that are fully scalable at speeds limited only by the network's raw performance.
The system is available in two models. The SPP1600/CD features up to 16 PA-7200 processors, providing up to 3.8 GFLOPS peak performance and 4GB of physical memory. The SPP1600/XA features up to 64 processors, delivering performance levels as high as 15 GFLOPS with up to 16GB of total memory.
The SPP1600 features binary compatibility with the HP-UX operating system, making available for users thousands of widely used applications. Those applications include hundreds of the same scientific and technical solutions that run on HP workstations and servers. For the highest performance, applications may use shared memory or explicit message passing (EMP) parallelization, or a combination of both.
Based on the industry's broadest line of compatible UNIX(R) system servers, HP's K-class and SPP-based Scalable Storage Servers provide a complete range of storage capabilities. Some vendors may offer only portions of the data solutions customers need.
Entry-level systems are turnkey solutions based on the affordable, high-performance K-class multiprocessor servers. These cost-effective data systems also include FDDI or Ethernet networking capability, RAID disk cache, robotic tape library and data-management software.
The modular Storage Server product line is complemented by the Scalable Storage Manager, a suite of software products that provides Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) and data-delivery applications. This suite includes the following:
For higher-end processing and throughput requirements, the Exemplar Storage Server provides customers with unprecedented flexibility in configuring systems to suit their applications. Unlike solutions other vendors may offer, HP's storage solutions are unconstrained by system architecture. Customers can choose from a range of options in network interface, storage capacity and management software to suit their application environment. With that capability, the balance between centralization and distribution of storage and compute can be based on data-flow requirements rather than on system limitations.
SPP1600 systems and K-class servers and SPP1600-based Scalable Storage Servers are available now.
Prices for SPP1600/CD systems begin at $106,000 for a two-CPU system. Prices for SPP1600/XA systems begin at $349,500 for an eight-CPU system.
Prices for K-class system storage servers begin at $285,000. SPP1600 Scalable Storage Servers begin at under $600,000.
Hewlett-Packard Company is a leading global manufacturer of computing, communications and measurement products and services recognized for excellence in quality and support. HP has 105,200 employees and had revenue of $31.5 billion in its 1995 fiscal year.
Information about HP and its products can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.hp.com.
HP-UX 9.X and 10.0 for HP 9000 Series 700 and 800 computers are X/Open Company UNIX 93 branded products. HP-UX 10.10 is an X/Open UNIX 95 branded product.
