Hewlett Packard

Hewlett Packard Company

Status

Hewlett-Packard Company is a global manufacturer of computing, communications and measurement products and services.

Overview of Organization

Formed in the 30s by Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett with an initial capital of $538. The company first product is the resistance-capacity audio oscillator (HP200A), an electronic instrument used to test sound equipment which was introduced in 1938. Since the introduction of that first product, HP has expanded to become a global manufacturer of computing and communication products. Some of HP latest products and services are directed for electronic commerce.

In 1995, they acquired Convex Computer Corporation supplier of high-performance computing solutions.

As of 1997, the company's revenue was $42.9 billion and employing 121,900 worldwide.

Contact Address:

HP
Palo Alto
california, USA.


Division's homepage.

HP-Convex SPP-2000

Overview of Platform:

Crossbar-based symmetric multiprocessor (SMP).

Compute Hardware:

A distributed shared memory (DSM) machine based on the HP PA-8000 processors (180 MHz clock speed), the SPP-2000 system is built around the "hypernode" configuration. Each hypernode can have up to 16 HP PA-RISC 8000 processors and 16 Gbytes of memory. The PA-8000 has 10 piplined functional units and 4-way suprescalar.

Interconnect / Communications System:

Within a single hypernode, the 16-processors are connected through a non-blocking crossbar switch, with a datapath of 64-bit wide and 960 MB/second bandwidth.
Multiple hypernodes are interconnected through the CTI (Coherent Toroidal Interconnect) in a torus-like (donut) configuration as shown in the figure below.
Each ring is unidirectional, so remote memory access does not depend on how far a hypernode is from the hypernode requesting the data. A router supports alternate routing paths between nodes. The following figure shows the CTI Rings:

Memory System:

Each hypernode has 4 GBs (256 Mb for CTI Network Cache, 410 Mb for Buffer Cache, and 80 Mb for OS), and up to 16 GB memory for the scalled up version. Maximum cabinet storage 612 GB with a maximum support for 12.96 TB.

Regarding the cache, it doesn't have on-chip cache but external one with a latency of 3 clock cycles. Bandwidth from cache to CPU is 2.88 Gbytes/sec. Bandwidth of data from memory to cache is 960 Mbyte/sec, and cache coherency is a directory based.

Benchmarks / Compute and data transfer performance:

Below are some representative benchmarks performed on NCSA platforms using GAUSSIAN-94 (G94). They show that the SGI Origin2000 and HP/Convex Exemplar SPP-2000 run virtually neck-and-neck in performance for this test case, in both scaling and per-processor performance.

Gaussian 94 - Molecule Alpha Pinene Results:

The PA-8000 peak performance: can execute up to 4 FP ops per cycle, resulting in 720 MFLOPS peak.

Operating System Software and Environment:

SPP-UX, a POSIX.1 conformant extension of HP-UX (HP-UX is based on Novell's UNIX). Process scheduling is non-preemptive (only kernel preempts) also supports POSIX threads.

Networkability/ I/O System / Integrability / Reliability / Scalability:

Each of the agent chips has an I/O channel.
Each I/O channel supports a 120 MB/sec PCI bus.
I/O path is 32 bits wide.
Each PCI controller supports 10 Ultra-SCSI disks.
Each disk has 9 Gbytes capacity.
Estimated bandwidth is 30-35 MB/sec per controller.

Notable Applications / Customers / Market Sectors:

CFD as well as computational physics are two of many applications suitable for the SPP-2000.

Overall Comments: