The Scalable POWERparallel (SP) is a discontinued series of

supercomputer A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...

s in the

RS/6000 The RISC System/6000 is a family of RISC-based (Reduced Instruction Set Computer-based) Unix servers, workstations and supercomputers made by IBM in the 1990s. The RS/6000 family replaced the IBM RT PC computer platform in February 1990 an ...

line by

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

. The first model, the SP1, was introduced in February 1993, and new models were introduced throughout the 1990s until the RS/6000 was succeeded by eServer pSeries in October 2000. The SP is a

distributed memory In computer science, distributed memory refers to a Multiprocessing, multiprocessor computer system in which each Central processing unit, processor has its own private Computer memory, memory. Computational tasks can only operate on local data ...

system, consisting of multiple RS/6000-based nodes interconnected by an IBM-proprietary switch called the High Performance Switch (HPS). The nodes are

cluster may refer to: Science and technology Astronomy * Cluster (spacecraft), constellation of four European Space Agency spacecraft * Cluster II (spacecraft), a European Space Agency mission to study the magnetosphere * Asteroid cluster, a small ...

ed using software called PSSP, which is mainly written in

Perl Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed ...

. Computer scientist Marc Snir was awarded the

Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award The Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award, also known as the Seymour Cray Award, is an award given by the IEEE Computer Society, to recognize significant and innovative contributions in the field of supercomputer, high-performance computing. The ...

by the

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and other related disciplines. The IEEE has a corporate office ...

in 2013 for his contributions to supercomputing, which included his work on the SP.

Models

Deployments

* The

Cornell Theory Center The Cornell University Center for Advanced Computing (CAC), housed at Frank H. T. Rhodes Hall on the campus of Cornell University, is one of five original centers in the National Science Foundation's Supercomputer Centers Program. It was formerl ...

had a 512-node system that was ranked as the sixth fastest supercomputer in the world by the November 1995 edition of the Top500 List. From a peak performance of 136.19

GFLOPS Floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate measu ...

, it obtained 88.40

on the

LINPACK benchmark The LINPACK benchmarks are a measure of a system's floating-point computing power. Introduced by Jack Dongarra, they measure how fast a computer solves a dense ''n'' × ''n'' system of linear equations ''Ax'' = ''b'', which i ...

. * Deep Blue, the first computer to win a chess game against a reigning world champion in a

match A match is a tool for starting a fire. Typically, matches are made of small wooden sticks or stiff paper. One end is coated with a material that can be ignited by friction generated by striking the match against a suitable surface. Wooden matc ...

with

Garry Kasparov Garry Kimovich Kasparov (born Garik Kimovich Weinstein on 13 April 1963) is a Russian Grandmaster (chess), chess grandmaster, former World Chess Champion (1985–2000), political activist and writer. His peak FIDE chess Elo rating system, ra ...

in 1996. * ASCI Blue Pacific is a

PowerPC 604 The PowerPC 600 family was the first family of PowerPC processors built. They were designed at the Somerset facility in Austin, Texas, jointly funded and staffed by engineers from IBM and Motorola as a part of the AIM alliance. Somerset was opened ...

-based system with a peak performance of 3.9

TFLOPS Floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate measur ...

. It was installed at the

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a Federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in Livermore, California, United States. Originally established in 1952, the laboratory now i ...

(LLNL) in 1998 as part of the Advanced Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI). *

ASCI White ASCI White was a supercomputer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which was briefly the fastest supercomputer in the world. It was a computer cluster based on IBM's commercial IBM RS/6000 SP computer. 512 nodes were i ...

is a 512-node system with a peak performance of 12.3TFLOPS. It was installed at the LLNL in 2001 as part of ASCI, and was ranked #1 in the Top500 List from November 2000 to November 2001. * Seaborg, at the

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL, Berkeley Lab) is a Federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in the Berkeley Hills, hills of Berkeley, California, United States. Established i ...

, was ranked as the fifth fastest supercomputer in the world when it debuted in the June 2003 edition of the Top500 List. From a peak performance of 9.98TFLOPS, it obtained 7.30TFLOPS on the LINPACK benchmark.

References

External links

* * {{web archive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20040813202207/http://www.llnl.gov/computing/tutorials/ibm_sp/, title=IBM SP Systems Overview Scalable POWERparallel Parallel computing PowerPC computers

Models

Deployments

See also

References

External links