Hitachi Ltd has doubled the performance and scaling of its existing SR2201 massively parallel supercomputer, claiming that at 600 GFLOPS the 2,048 processor monster is the world’s fastest. Hitachi will make its first SR2201 sale outside Japan to the University of Cambridge in the UK and says it’ll now target Europe as well as its home market for parallel supercomputer sales. The SR2201 uses a variant of Hewlett-Packard Co’s PA-RISC developed by Hitachi in Japan, though the company was unable to say specifically which member of the PA family it is based upon. A compact model, with from eight to 64 CPUs which performs at from 2.4 to 19.2 GFLOPS can be leased beginning at around $14,000 per month. It takes up around 60% less space than previous models. It supports 64Gb disk and 1Gb RAM and uses a 300Mbps two-dimensional cross-bar switch. Lease prices start at $14,000 per month. The high-end model supports up to 2,048 CPUs. Lease prices start at $46,000 per month. The pseudo-vector processor runs Hitachi’s HI-UX/MPP Mach 3.0 implementation and uses Parasoft Corp’s Express parallel support system rebadged as ParallelWare. The company hopes to sell 30 of the systems before March 1999. Hitachi¦s first SR server, the 2001, launched more than two years ago, was a 128-way system that did 23 GFLOPs. Hitachi hasn’t quite made the 1 teraflop goal it set itself of reaching by the end of this year. Last August it introduced the 1,024-way, 300 GFLOPS SR2201. Outside Japan Hitachi sells PowerPC-based Unix servers sourced from IBM Corp and Compagnie des Machines Bull SA.
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