HP Superdome

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The HP Superdome is a high-end model of computer developed and produced by Hewlett-Packard. Presently, it scales up to 128 RISC processor cores and 2 TB of memory.

As originally introduced in 2000, Superdome used PA-RISC processors. Since 2002, [1] there is another version of the machine based on Itanium 2 processors, marketed in parallel as HP Integrity Superdome. The classic PA-RISC Superdome has been subsequently rebranded to HP 9000 Superdome.

Superdome usually runs HP-UX operating system, although Itanium 2 version is also compatible with many other systems, for example with Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell.

Contents

[edit] Cell architecture (sx1000 version)

A building block is a cell, a card holding 4 processors and memory. Superdome has a ccNUMA architecture, which means that processors have shorter access times for their cell's memory, and longer access times for other cell's memories. Cache coherency between processors is handled via directory memory. [2]

A center of each cell is an ASIC called cell controller (CC), that connects to 4 processor sockets (on average 1.6 GB/s per socket), to 4 local memory subsystems, and to the backplane. The CC itself contains a crossbar, and 4 CCs interconnect via a second-level crossbar. In maximum machine's configuration 4 second-level crossbars interconnect with each other, supporting in total 64 processor sockets.

One socket may hold either a dual-core PA-RISC processor (either PA-8600, PA-8700, PA-8800, or recently PA-8900), a single-core Itanium 2 processor, two Itanium 2 processors (called mx2 module), or one dual-core Itanium 2 processor. There are almost no architectural differencies between PA-RISC and Itanium versions of Superdome.

[edit] Input/output

Each CC connects to one local I/O controller (an SBA), which in turn may connect to a single I/O card cage (also called I/O chassis) with 12 PCI slots. It is not possible to expand the number of I/O slots for a cell.

Superdome does not contain any internal hard disks, it relies exclusively on external disk enclosures.

[edit] Physical layout

Superdome is not mounted on a standard rack, it is instead shipped as either one or two dedicated cabinets. One cabinet scales up to 8 cells.

[edit] Partitioning

Superdome supports nPars (node partitions), that are granular on the level of a whole cell (and its I/O card cage). Only the HP9000 Superdome supports vPars (virtual partitions), granular on a single processor level and a single PCI slot level. [3]

[edit] References

  1. ^ HP Showcasing Itanium-based Superdome Server. HP (Dec. 9, 2002). Retrieved on 2008-03-29.
  2. ^ van der Steen, Aad J.; Jack J. Dongarra. Overview of Recent Supercomputers. Retrieved on 2008-03-29.
  3. ^ Asghar, Ghori (2007). HP Certified Systems Administrator (2nd Edition), 132-136. ISBN 1424342317. 
 This computer hardware-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.