Scalable POWERparallel (SP) is a series of

supercomputer A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...

s from IBM. SP systems were part of the IBM RISC System/6000 (RS/6000) family, and were also called the RS/6000 SP. The first model, the SP1, was introduced in February 1993, and new models were introduced throughout the 1990s until the RS/6000 was succeeded by eServer pSeries in October 2000. The SP is a

distributed memory In computer science, distributed memory refers to a multiprocessor computer system in which each processor has its own private memory. Computational tasks can only operate on local data, and if remote data are required, the computational task mu ...

system, consisting of multiple RS/6000-based nodes interconnected by an IBM-proprietary switch called the High Performance Switch (HPS). The nodes are

cluster may refer to: Science and technology Astronomy * Cluster (spacecraft), constellation of four European Space Agency spacecraft * Asteroid cluster, a small asteroid family * Cluster II (spacecraft), a European Space Agency mission to study t ...

ed using software called PSSP, which is mainly written in

Perl Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offici ...

. Computer scientist Marc Snir was awarded the

Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award The Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award, also known as the Seymour Cray Award, is an award given by the IEEE Computer Society, to recognize significant and innovative contributions in the field of supercomputer, high-performance computing. The ...

by the

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

in 2013 for his contributions to supercomputing, which included his work on the SP.

Notable systems

* The

Cornell Theory Center The Cornell University Center for Advanced Computing (CAC), housed at Frank H. T. Rhodes Hall on the campus of Cornell University, is one of five original centers in the National Science Foundation's Supercomputer Centers Program. It was formerl ...

had a 512-node system that was ranked as the sixth fastest supercomputer in the world by the November 1995 edition of the Top500 List. From a peak performance of 136.19

GFLOPS In computing, floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate meas ...

, it obtained 88.40

on the

LINPACK benchmark The LINPACK Benchmarks are a measure of a system's Floating-point arithmetic, floating-point computing power. Introduced by Jack Dongarra, they measure how fast a computer solves a dense ''n'' by ''n'' system of linear equations ''Ax'' =&nbs ...

. *

Deep Blue Deep Blue may refer to: Film * ''Deep Blues: A Musical Pilgrimage to the Crossroads'', a 1992 documentary film about Mississippi Delta blues music * Deep Blue (2001 film), ''Deep Blue'' (2001 film), a film by Dwight H. Little * Deep Blue (2003 ...

, the first computer to win a chess game against a reigning world champion in a

match A match is a tool for starting a fire. Typically, matches are made of small wooden sticks or stiff paper. One end is coated with a material that can be ignited by friction generated by striking the match against a suitable surface. Wooden matc ...

with

Garry Kasparov Garry Kimovich Kasparov (born 13 April 1963) is a Russian chess grandmaster, former World Chess Champion, writer, political activist and commentator. His peak rating of 2851, achieved in 1999, was the highest recorded until being surpassed by ...

in 1996. *

ASCI Blue Pacific ASCI Blue Pacific was a supercomputer installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in Livermore, CA at the end of 1998. It was a collaboration between IBM and LLNL. It was an IBM RS/6000 SP ''massively parallel processing'' s ...

is a

PowerPC 604 The PowerPC 600 family was the first family of PowerPC processors built. They were designed at the Somerset facility in Austin, Texas, jointly funded and staffed by engineers from IBM and Motorola as a part of the AIM alliance. Somerset was opened ...

-based system with a peak performance of 3.9

TFLOPS In computing, floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate mea ...

. It was installed at the

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a federal research facility in Livermore, California, United States. The lab was originally established as the University of California Radiation Laboratory, Livermore Branch in 1952 in response ...

(LLNL) in 1998 as part of the Advanced Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI). *

ASCI White ASCI White was a supercomputer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which was briefly the fastest supercomputer in the world. It was a computer cluster based on IBM's commercial RS/6000 SP computer. 512 nodes were ...

is a 512-node system with a peak performance of 12.3TFLOPS. It was installed at the LLNL in 2001 as part of ASCI, and was ranked #1 in the Top500 List from November 2000 to November 2001. * Seaborg, at the

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), commonly referred to as the Berkeley Lab, is a United States Department of Energy National Labs, United States national laboratory that is owned by, and conducts scientific research on behalf of, t ...

, was ranked as the fifth fastest supercomputer in the world when it debuted in the June 2003 edition of the Top500 List. From a peak performance of 9.98TFLOPS, it obtained 7.30TFLOPS on the LINPACK benchmark.

Nodes

POWER1-based

POWER2-based

PowerPC 604-based

P2SC-based

POWER3-based

References

{{Reflist

External links

Architectural overview
Scalable POWERparallel Parallel computing PowerPC computers