By Timothy Prickett Morgan
Silicon Graphics Inc last week began volume shipments of its next generation supercomputer, the SV1. The SV1s, which are servers that include a mix of ultra-high-performance vector and high- performance parallel processors in a single box, are the follow- ons to three of SGI’s Cray product lines, the J90s, C90s and YMPs. With SGI looking for a buyer for its supercomputer unit, the future of the SV2 kicker to the SV1, which was intended to replace the high-end T90 Cray boxes, is up in the air. Cray customers seem to be undaunted by SGI’s woes, however. SGI has an initial backlog of 68 SV1 systems comprising more than 1,400 vector and parallel engines, which it says it will be able to mostly fulfill by the end of September.
The SV1 can have one, four, eight or 32 SMP processor nodes in a single box and from 16Gb to 1Tb of main memory. Each of those SMP nodes can be equipped with 300MHz multi-streaming vector processors that can deliver 4.8 GFLOPS of computing power as well as regular 300MHz processors with 1.2 GFLOPS of power. The MSP vector processor is really just four of the others stacked up on the other side of the SMP connection, working in parallel and tricking the machine’s Unicos operating system into believing that it is a standard Cray vector processor. Each SMP node in the SV1 can have a maximum of four MSP vector units or 16 parallel processors; customers can mix and match depending on their software requirements. A fully configured SV1 SMP node has six MSP vector units and eight parallel units for a total of 32 processors; up to 32 of these nodes brings the aggregate peak theoretical throughput of the SV1 to over 1.2 TFLOPS.
SGI says that the unit uses similar symmetric multiprocessing techniques as that employed in the Cray T90 and J90 series, and that the machine’s vector cache memory provides up to 25.6 GB/sec in memory bandwidth. Initial customers for the SV1 include the US Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), which will buy a 64 MSP vector processor unit to sit alongside the 692 processor Cray T3E parallel supercomputer it has for research.
