THE EXEMPLAR SPP-SERIES AND FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF HP´S NEW HIGH-END PRODUCT LINE

F. Beatke
VANT. Ser.: Mat. Mod. Fiz. Proc 1997. Вып.1. С. 68-69.

      The computer industry is experiencing a major paradigm shift which is clearly visible in the trend towards microprocessor based system even at very high end. The niches still ???u?ied by proprietary CPU designs like vector-processors ?re under attack from a new class of RISC designs which are capable to access main memory with long sequences of vector-like load sequences.
      Different evaluation criteria and performance characteristics have been defined to compare and analyze parallel systems from the level of the processors over the interconnect technology and the memory subsystems up to the features of the operating system and its capabilities.
      Hewlett-Packards new Exemplar SPP series is being evaluated within the contexts defined above with a special emphasis on:
      - PA-RISC 7200/8000 memory access capabilities compared to competing architectures and utilization in the SPP-series;
      - interconnect technology at node and system level and performance metrics like bandwidth and latency;
      - features of the micro-kernel based SPP-UX operating system;
      - features of the parallelizing compilers for C, C + + and Fortran.
      The future development of the Exemplar SPP-series which has established with the SPPlxxx products and is now being continued with SPP2000 will finally be discussed. Additional information on measured and expected performance for test-examples and real industrial applications were provided.