The HP Integrity Superdome

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 POWER6
    3. IBM PowerPC 970
    4. IBM BlueGene processors
    5. Intel Itanium 2
    6. Intel Xeon
    7. The MIPS processor
    8. The SPARC processors
  8. Accelerators
    1. GPU accelerators
    2. General accelerators
    3. FPGA accelerators
  9. Networks
    1. Infiniband
    2. InfiniPath
    3. Myrinet
    4. QsNet
Available systems
  1. The Bull NovaScale
  2. The C-DAC PARAM Padma
  3. The Cray XT3
  4. The Cray XT4
  5. The Cray XT5h
  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 BlueGene/L&P
  13. The IBM eServer p575
  14. The IBM System Cluster 1350
  15. The Liquid Computing LiquidIQ
  16. The NEC Express5800/1000
  17. The NEC SX-9
  18. The SGI Altix 4000
  19. The SiCortex SC series
  20. The Sun M9000
Systems disappeared from the list
Systems under development
Glossary
Acknowledgments
References

Machine type RISC-based ccNUMA system
Models HP Integrity Superdome
Operating system HP-UX (HP's usual Unix flavour), Linux (SuSE SLES 10), Microsoft Windows Server 2008, OpenVMS
Connection structure Crossbar
Compilers Fortran 77, Fortran 90, Parallel Fortran, HPF, C, C++
Vendors information Web page http://h20341.www2.hp.com/integrity/cache/342254-0-0-0-121.html
Year of introduction 2004

System parameters:

Model Integrity SuperDome
Clock cycle 1.6 GHz
Theor. peak performance  
Per core (64-bits) 6.4 Gflop/s
Maximal (64-bits) 819.2 Gflop/s
Main memory  
Memory/frame ≤ 2 TB
No. of processors 6–64
Communication bandwidth  
(cell—backplane) 8.5 GB/s
(within cell, see below) 34.6 GB/s

Remarks:

The Integrity Superdome is HP's investment in the future for high-end servers. Within a timespan of a few years it should replace the PA-RISC-based HP 9000 Superdome completely. HP has anticipated on this by giving it exactly the same macro structure: cells are connected to a backplane crossbar that enables the communication between cells. For the backplane it is immaterial whether a cell contains PA-RISC or Itanium processors. The Superdome has a 2-level crossbar: one level within a 4-processor cell and another level by connecting the cells through the crossbar backplane. Every cell connects to the backplane at a speed of 8.5 GB/s. In fact, the inter-cell crossbar is implemented as 3 parallel crossbars which makes it highly resistent against failure.

As said, the basic building block of the Superdome is the 4-processor cell. All data traffic within a cell is controlled by the Cell Controller, a 10-port ASIC. It connects to the four local memory subsystems at 17.1 GB/s, to the backplane crossbar at 34.6 GB/s, and to two ports that each serve two processors at 8.5 GB/s/port. As each processor houses two CPU cores the available bandwidth per CPU core is 1.6 GB/s. Like the SGI Altix systems, the cache coherency in the Superdome is secured by using directory memory. The NUMA factor for a full 64 processor systems is by HP's account very modest: only 1.8.

The Integrity Superdome, like its predecessor, is a ccNUMA machine. It therefore supports OpenMP over its maximum of 64 processors. As the Integrity Superdome is based on the Itanium 2 for which much Linux development is done in the past few years, the system can also be run with the Linux OS. In fact, because the machine can be partitioned, it is possible to run both Linux and HP-UX in the different complexes of the same machine. One can even mix the old PA-RISC processors with Itanium processors within one system: cells with different types of processors, making the system a hybrid Integrity and HP 9000 Superdome. Unfortunately, the largest configuration with 64 processors is only offered with HP-UX, HP's proprietary OS. This does not help spreading in the HPC community. For the other operating systems the maximum size has 32 processors/64 cores.

Measured Performances:
In the TOP500 list of June 2007 a Myrinet-connected cluster of Superdomes is reported to attain 4972 out of 5990 Gflop/s on 936 cores (468 processors) with HP-UX as the operating System. The efficiency was 82%.