IBM RS/6000 SP

IBM Scalable POWERparallel (SP) series

Company type	Product line
Industry	Supercomputing
Founded	February 1993 (1993-02)
Defunct	October 2000 (2000-10)
Headquarters	Armonk , United States
Products	Supercomputers (RS/6000-based nodes)
Parent	IBM

The Scalable POWERparallel (SP) series represents a now-obsolete line of supercomputers within IBM's RS/6000 family. The initial unit, the SP1, was introduced in February 1993, with additional versions released throughout the 1990s until the RS/6000 was succeeded by the eServer pSeries in October 2000. The SP systems utilized a distributed memory design, composed of numerous RS/6000-based nodes interconnected through IBM’s proprietary High Performance Switch (HPS). These nodes were managed collectively via PSSP software, which was mainly developed using Perl.

In recognition of his contributions to supercomputing technology, including work on the SP, computer scientist Marc Snir was honored with the Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2013.

Models

List of models

Model	# of CPUs	CPU	CPU MHz	Memory	Introduced	Discontinued
SP1	1	POWER1++	62.5	64 to 256 MB	1993-02-02	1994-12-16
Thin Node	1	POWER2	66	64 to 512 MB	1994-04-06	1996-07-26
Thin Node 2					1995-02-07	1997-06-27
Wide Node				64 MB to 2 GB	1994-04-06	1996-07-26
77 MHz Wide Node			77		1995-08-22	1997-06-27
High 1	2, 4, 6, 8	PowerPC 604	112	?	1996-07-23	1998-01-08
High 2		PowerPC 604e	200	?	1997-08-26	1998-04-21
332 Thin	2,4		?	?	1998-04-21	2000-12-29
332 Wide
160 Thin	1	P2SC	160	?	1997-10-06	1998-04-21
Thin P2SC			120	?	1996-10-08
Wide P2SC			135	?	?
POWER3 High	2,4,6,8	POWER3	222	?	1999-09-13	2000-12-29
POWER3 High		POWER3-II	375	?	2000-07-18	2002-12-27
POWER3 Thin	1,2	POWER3	200	?	1999-09-01	2000-06-30
POWER3 Thin		POWER3-II	375	?	2000-02-07	2003-04-08
POWER3 Thin			450	?	2002-01-22
POWER3 Wide	1,2	POWER3	200	?	1999-02-01	2000-06-30
POWER3 Wide	2,4	POWER3-II	375	?	2000-02-07	2003-04-08
POWER3 Wide   | 450  | ?  | 2002-01-22  | } Deployments The Cornell Theory Center operated a system with 512 nodes that was ranked as the sixth fastest worldwide in November 1995. It achieved a peak computational capability of 136.19GFLOPS and delivered an LINPACK benchmark performance of 88.40GFLOPS. Deep Blue, distinguished for being the first machine to defeat a reigning world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, in their match during 1996. The ASCI Blue Pacific, built on the PowerPC 604 architecture, provided a peak performance of 3.9TFLOPS. This system was installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in 1998 as part of the Advanced Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI). Introduced in 2001 at LLNL for ASCI, ASCI White comprised a cluster of 512 nodes and reached a maximum output of 12.3TFLOPS. It held the top position on the TOP500 list from November 2000 through November 2001. Seaborg, located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, debuted in June 2003 as the fifth fastest supercomputer globally. It attained peak speeds of approximately 9.98TFLOPS and achieved a LINPACK score of around 7.30TFLOPS. See also Blue Gene External links Archived official site Archived overview of IBM SP Systems