Recount of the (almost) available systems

Introduction
HPC Architecture
  1. Shared-memory SIMD machines
  2. Distributed-memory SIMD machines
  3. Shared-memory MIMD machines
  4. Distributed-memory MIMD machines
  5. ccNUMA machines
  6. Clusters
  7. Processors
    1. AMD Opteron
    2. IBM POWER5+
    3. IBM BlueGene processor
    4. Intel Itanium 2
    5. Intel Xeon
    6. The SPARC processors
  8. Networks
    1. Infiniband
    2. InfiniPath
    3. Myrinet
    4. QsNet
    5. SCI
Available systems
  1. The Bull NovaScale
  2. The C-DAC PARAM Padma
  3. The Cray X1E
  4. The Cray XD1
  5. The Cray XT3
  6. The Fujitsu/Siemens PRIMEPOWER
  7. The Fujitsu/Siemens PRIMEQUEST
  8. The Hitachi BladeSymphony
  9. The Hitachi SR11000
  10. The HP Integrity Superdome
  11. The IBM eServer p575
  12. The IBM BlueGene/L
  13. The NEC Express5800/1000
  14. The NEC SX-8
  15. The SGI Altix 4000
  16. The SunFire E25K
Systems disappeared from the list
Systems under development
Glossary
Acknowledgements
References

In this section we give a recount of all types of systems as discussed in the former section and that are marketed presently or will appear within 6 months from now. When vendors market more than one type of machine we will discuss them in distinct subsections. So, for instance, we will discuss Cray systems under entries, X1E and XD1 because they have a very different structure.

A reservation with respect to the word "available" in the heading of this section is in order: rather theoretically available is a better description of the situation. This has nothing to do with the technical ability of the vendors to produce the systems described but everything with the ability of the vendor to invest in selling the system: when a large system is purchased this aught to come with the required maintenance and support. Some vendors cannot or will not sell a system in certain parts of the world because they are not willing or able to provide the necessary maintenance and/or support for the system that is theoretically available. For instance, it is not possible to buy a large Fujitsu(-Siemens) PRIMEPOWER or PRIMEQUEST or a Hitachi SR11000 or BladeSymphony in Europe. Nevertheless we still discuss these systems in the section below for general interest and for those that are located in a part of the world where these vendors deem the selling of their systems economically viable.

System descriptions of:

The systems are presented alphabetically in the pages listed in the sidebar. The "Machine type" entry shortly characterises the type of system as discussed in the former chapter: Processor Array, ccNUMA, etc.