Hewlett-Packard Co is upgrading its high-end V-Class and mid- range K-Class technical servers with the 240MHz version of its PA-8200 RISC which already features in some of its workstations. It’s the last turn of the PA-8200 clock as the company prepares to move to the PA-8500, springboard for its Intel Merced systems. HP claims its new 16-way Model V2250 offers 30% better TPC-C performance than the previous 200MHz V2200 configuration. It says that performing 52,117 tmpC running Sybase Adaptive Server – or $82 per tpmC – V2250 offers the industry’s highest single-node performance. Uniprocessor prices begin at $182,000 with 256Mb RAM; additional processors cost from $33,000. The V-Class uses a HyperPlane cross-bar interconnect from HP’s Convex Computer subsidiary which support 16 960Mbps connections. V2250 can be clustered with HP’s Enterprise Parallel Server hardware/software which supports 16 nodes. Ships begin in April. New six-way 240MHz K-Class servers are designated K380 and K580 and are claimed to offer 20% better performance than their predecessors. The former supports 4Gb RAM, the latter up to 8Gb RAM. Uniprocessor configurations cost from $80,000 and $96,000 respectively; additional CPUs cost from $25,000. In addition to PA-8500 systems, and support for 32-way SMP, HP will offer users the ability to configure ccNUMA cache coherent distributed shared memory systems later this year by incorporating ccNUMA features of Convex’s SPP-UX operating system into HP-UX. HP says it hasn’t decided whether the functionality will be introduced as a point release or a patch but it expects ccNUMA to be employed only when a user has reached the company’s SMP limit which by then will be 32 processors. It says it doesn’t envisage implementing ccNUMA like Sequent Computers Inc and others from two- or four-way building blocks which it says feature unacceptable latencies between nodes. Its notion is to maximize use of latency-free SMP models before moving to ccNUMA.
