Amidst all the financial woes at Silicon Graphics Inc, the company’s Cray Research unit is taking comfort in technical matters, and claims to have broken the symmetrical multiprocessing scalability barrier with a 128 processor configuration of its MIPS R10000-based Origin2000 supercomputer running in a single system image environment. The system is installed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Champaign, Illinois. There is a similar configuration running at Cray’s data center in Eagan, Minnesota, and one more at Silicon Graphics in Mountain View, California. The box uses Cray’s S2MP cc-NUMA shared memory architecture, CrayLink interconnect technology and Cray’s MetaRouter software for controlling large numbers of processors. But it’s the Unix operating system, based on Silicon Graphics’ Irix, which has been upgraded to enable a single system image over the 128 nodes, and beyond. Cray has upgraded the virtual memory management, and implemented the first features of its forthcoming Cellular Irix technology, worked on in conjunction with Stanford University (CI No 3,022). Tests so far show near linear scaling in all dimensions, according to Cray. Silicon Graphics says it will demonstrate the system from its stand at the Supercomputer 97 show in San Jose this week. A beta program for the new configuration is scheduled for the first half of next year, with general availability to follow. Cray, which has sold around 10,000 Origin2000s and just announced general availability of 64 processor versions, says it will eventually scale systems up to thousands of processors. The NCSA is one of Cray’s early adopters, and already has an array of four 32-processor and four 64-processor Origin2000 systems connected via HIPPI interconnection.
