At SC99 Compaq Computer Corporation announced its first supercomputer and the most powerful AlphaServer offering to date, the AlphaServer SC Series. The new server delivers new levels of supercomputing power with significant ease of management benefits, sets a new aggressive price point for high-performance computing systems, and boasts performance in the multi-TeraFLOPs range.
Portland, Oregon -- The following was transcribed from a white paper released by Compaq at SC99: Compaq Computer Corporation's new series of supercomputers, the Compaq AlphaServer SC Series, is built from commodity off-the-shelf (COTS) components connected together with an ultra-low-latency, high-bandwidth, interconnect from our partner, Quadrics Supercomputer World Ltd. (QSW).
The AlphaServer SC system is targeted at the high end of the high-performance computing market and will have performance in the multi-TeraFLOP range. With the first release, customers will be able to connect up to 128 Compaq AlphaServer symmetric multiprocessor nodes to form a single system. The AlphaServer SC system is designed and engineered to meet the needs of customers who have the most demanding technical computing requirements. The system will satisfy both the capacity and the capability requirements of the high performance supercomputing market.
The Compaq AlphaServer SC system uses Compaq's Tru64 UNIX operating system and additional Compaq AlphaServer SC system software components such as the Compaq cluster file system and the Resource Management System from QSW. In addition, the AlphaServer SC development software includes Compaq's well-known high-performance compilers and tools.
The Compaq AlphaServer SC series will be announced at Supercomputing '99 in Portland Oregon, on November 16, 1999. AlphaServer SC systems, with Compaq AlphaServer ES40s as nodes, are orderable now. The first American system, a 128-node machine, was shipped in September 1999 to Lawrence Livermore National Labs (LLNL). The first European machine was shipped to the civilian department of the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA-Civil).
Other machines are currently being built and are scheduled for shipment in Q4 CY'99. Volume manufacturing of AlphaServer SC V1.0 systems will commence in Q1 CY'00. Future AlphaServer SC systems will add support for Compaq AlphaServer GS series nodes, node counts greater than 128, faster PCI technology, multi-rail SC Interconnects, and check-point restart. Future systems will also include optimizations to the MPI and Shmem libraries.
For more information, see http://www.compaq.com/hpc. To download the "Compaq AlphaServer SC Announcement Whitepaper" (981KB), click on the link below:
http://www.tgc.com/sponsors/compaq/SCpaper.zip