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 processors
    4. Intel Itanium 2
    5. Intel Xeon
    6. The MIPS processor
    7. 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 XT3
  5. The Cray XT4
  6. The Cray XMT
  7. The Fujitsu/Siemens M9000
  8. The Fujitsu/Siemens PRIMEQUEST
  9. The Hitachi BladeSymphony
  10. The Hitachi SR11000
  11. The HP Integrity Superdome
  12. The IBM eServer p575
  13. The IBM BlueGene/L&P
  14. The Liquid Computing LiquidIQ
  15. The NEC Express5800/1000
  16. The NEC SX-8
  17. The SGI Altix 4000
  18. The SiCortex SC series
  19. The Sun M9000
Systems disappeared from the list
Systems under development
Glossary
Acknowledgments
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, XT3/4, and XMT because they have a very different structure.

As already remarked in the Introduction we will not discuss clusters here but restrict ourselves to "integrated" parallel systems. However, the distinction between clusters and integrated systems becomes less and less clear as the network speed of clusters and integrated systems are (almost) comparable and the number of cores in a cluster node also approaches (or in the case of the Cray XT3/4 is larger than) the number found in the integrated systems. The criteria we use consist of the special measures a vendor has taken to more tightly integrate the nodes in the system than what is found in the standard cluster. Such measures may be in hardware, like special barrier registers, or software, like a vendor-optimised fast intra-node MPI, or both. It may well be that even these kinds of distinctions will disappear over time. In that case the difference will have disappeared completely and we will add the (former) clusters to this overview.

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) 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.