Hewlett-Packard Co is using ccNUMA technology from its Convex Computer subsidiary in a new V Series of HP-UX servers that will be targeted at both commercial and technical markets. Initially the servers will support HP’s Precision Architecture RISC family, including the newest PA-8200, but Convex’s 2Gbps crossbar interconnect switch is currently being souped-up to be used in systems built around Intel Corp’s Merced part which will support both iAPX-86 and PA binaries. Yesterday HP announced upgrades to its technical server and workstations lines – a V Series announcement in the commercial space is expected shortly. PA-8200 upgrades to the single-node, 16-way PA-8000-based Convex Exemplar S2000 technical servers will be available by year-end running either a new 5.3 version of Convex SPP-UX Unix (as the S2200), or the forthcoming HP-UX 11.0, a 64-bit release of HP’s Unix for technical systems known as 11.tech in its pre-release guise (as the V2200). The higher-end X-Class Exemplar Model X2000, which uses up to 64 PA-8000s and can be clustered in to very large parallel configurations, will be board upgradable to PA-8200 in the fourth quarter but available only with SPP-UX 5.3. SPP-UX will run HP-UX 10.10 application binaries, but not 10.20 or higher. HP is currently working to merge SPP-UX with HP-UX and will offer a combined operating system on new versions of the S-, V- and X-Class systems in 1999. The key addition to HP-UX will be SPP-UX’s support for distributed shared memory and parallelization, enabling systems to be clustered in ccNUMA configurations, distributed files system technologies and scaling beyond 16 processors. HP currently supports some parallelization libraries such as PVM and MPI across for configuring multiple T- or K-Class servers into Enterprise Parallel Server configurations, but ccNUMA. In readiness for the PA-8200 upgrades HP has cut tags on existing PA-8000-based models. The base price of an S-Class server with four CPUs and 256Mb RAM is now $140,500, down 26%. Additional quad modules are $90,500, down from $116,500. 256Mb memory costs $11,520, down 44% on $20,480. Four-to-16 way S-Class servers are reduced in price by an average of around 25% – the 16-way is $494,700 compared with $648,420; while 16-to-64 way X-Class systems are down an average of 22%. The 64-way is $2.2m, down from $2.8m.
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