The 128-processor Unix server Fujitsu Ltd is to ship next fall will leverage the cross-bar processor interconnect switch used in its vector processing supercomputer to provide each processor with uniform access to memory. As there is supposedly no latency penalty it is more akin to a conventional symmetric multiprocessing system than a ccNUMA system. It will run a single copy of the Solaris operating system.
Users will be able to partition the system into as many as 15 logical systems and run a separate copy of the operating system in each. The challenge will be to provide on top of Solaris the kind of dynamic reconfiguration functions that are currently only available to mainframe users. This enables applications to failover to another partition or domain without requiring the system or application to be re-booted. It’s claimed Fujitsu will be able to offer this functionality on these systems.
A 64-way version of the server line, which Fujitsu calls Granpower, will be introduced next spring using the UltraSparc- compatible Sparc64 CPU designed by Fujitsu’s Hal Computer Systems Ltd unit.
