[rescue] IBM on ebay

[Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez]

On Fri, 17 May 2002, Sridhar the POWERful wrote:

> The only RS/6000's that have anything approaching "mainframe class"
> performance are SP's, which are essentially smaller RS/6000's with
> ancillary I/O processing and shared-memory clustering.  I want one. 8-)

As a poor fool that has had to spend many sleepless nights programming SP
system(s), I can tell you that the SP/2 is not a shared memory machine.
There is no single adress space, it is just a glorified cluster with each
node being an actual RS6K workstation, and some fancy switching topology
for internode communication. The only ime shared memory operation can be
achieved is inside an SMP node, all internode communication is performed
via message passing (usually using some sort o'MPI).

Why would anyone want one of these machines is beyond me... but it seems
that IBM was able to market them pretty well.... A large SGI system with
ccNUMA, now THAT I do want!