IBM Corp is now offering the ability to mix and match PCI and MCA bus nodes in SP parallel system with the addition of new PCI nodes featuring the 332MHz PowerPC 604e technology from its RS/6000 F50 server. Still milking its Deep Blue marketing triumph for all its worth, IBM’s claims an SP configured to play chess would be able to calculate one billion moves a second compared with Deep Blue’s 200 million moves a second which was enough to finish off the carbon unit’s champ Garry Kasparov. That’s because SP can now support a maximum of 1,728 CPUs in a 512 node system, up from 960. Later this year IBM will enable SP to use the F70 ‘Raven’ Micro Channel Architecture server which uses up to 12 64- bit 250MHz Apache (or RS64) chips, as an external database node. The new 332MHz nodes, available with two or four processor in ‘thin’ or ‘wide’ I/O configurations are being introduced in conjunction with a new Model 16S switch router providing higher data transfer between SP and other networks. Two PCI slots are available in thin node and 10 slots available in wide nodes with an integrated slot for the SP switch adapter. IBM has revved its AIX Unix to version 4.3.1 claiming up to 37% performance improvement in applications execution, better support for Java (JVM 1.1.4 and IBM’s just-in-time compiler), systems management (a Java GUI), and security – authentication via Kerberos 5 for frequently used TCP/IP commands; IP security supports unlimited filter rules to control network traffic; triple data encryption support; SSL Version 3 for data encryption and authentication using X.509v3 public key certificates. Its eNetwork Lightweight Directory Access Protocol version 1.1.1 is claimed to support up to four million directory entries. The Parallel System Support for AIX supports the new Mach 5 process 332MHz SMP nodes while the General Parallel File System for AIX now scales to 256 nodes providing transparent recovery from disk and node failures. If you want to play chess on the new SP a Deep Blue program will cost $1m. New uniprocessor nodes cost from $150,000.
