[rescue] IBM on ebay

[Sridhar the POWERful]

On Fri, 17 May 2002, Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez 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).

I played with PE on regular RS/6000's and seen the memory exchange/locking
stuff.  What does this stuff do?  I haven't really done anything with it,
but it looked like explicit transfer memory sharing.

> 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!

There *are* IBM NUMA machines.  Just not RS/6000's.

Peace...  Sridhar

--
"How do you fight such a savage?"

"With heart, faith, and steel.  There can be only one."
	-MacLeod and Ramirez, "Highlander"