Fujitsu Ltd has just announced the Fujitsu AP3000 series of UltraSparc-based parallel servers. The AP3000 is a distributed memory parallel server, with a Fujitsu-developed high-speed network called AP-Net interconnecting the UltraSparc chips. The AP3000 is designed to deliver high performance by parallelizing programs while maintaining a single system image. The servers run Sun Microsystems Inc’s Solaris, giving them access to more than 12,000 application packages, according to Fujitsu. Fujitsu expects the new series to be useful to researchers pursuing supercomputer performance, for example in the development of electronic design automation and computational chemistry. Service providers that want to use an AP3000 partitioned into multiple servers for handling multimedia information and decision support systems based on huge amounts of data such as from point-of-sale terminals. The US list price for a base AP3000 system is $267,000, and Fujitsu expects to ship 300 systems in the first three years of marketing.
