IBM RS/6000 SP

The Scalable POWERparallel (SP) is a discontinued series of supercomputers in the RS/6000 line by IBM. 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 system, consisting of multiple RS/6000-based nodes interconnected by an IBM-proprietary switch called the High Performance Switch (HPS). The nodes are clustered using software called PSSP, which is mainly written in Perl.

IBM RS/6000 SP

Developer	IBM
Type	Supercomputer platform
Release date	February 1993 (1993-02)
Discontinued	October 2000 (2000-10)
CPU	IBM POWER PowerPC
Successor	IBM Blue Gene
Website	rs6000.ibm.com at the Wayback Machine (archived 2000-08-16)

Computer scientist Marc Snir was awarded the Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2013 for his contributions to supercomputing, which included his work on the SP.^[1]

Models

List of models^[2]

Model	# of CPUs	CPU	CPU MHz	Memory	Introduced	Discontinued
SP1	1	POWER1++	62.5	64 to 256 MB	1993-02-02	1994-12-16
Thin Node	1	POWER2	66	64 to 512 MB	1994-04-06[3]	1996-07-26[4]
Thin Node 2					1995-02-07[5]	1997-06-27[6]
Wide Node				64 MB to 2 GB	1994-04-06[3]	1996-07-26[4]
77 MHz Wide Node			77		1995-08-22[7]	1997-06-27[6]
High 1	2, 4, 6, 8	PowerPC 604	112	?	1996-07-23	1998-01-08
High 2		PowerPC 604e	200		1997-08-26	1998-04-21
332 Thin	2, 4		332		1998-04-21	2000-12-29
332 Wide
160 Thin	1	P2SC	160		1997-10-06	1998-04-21
Thin P2SC			120		1996-10-08
Wide P2SC			135
POWER3 High	2, 4, 6, 8	POWER3	222		1999-09-13	2000-12-29
POWER3 High		POWER3-II	375		2000-07-18	2002-12-27
POWER3 Thin	1, 2	POWER3	200		1999-09-01	2000-06-30
POWER3 Thin		POWER3-II	375		2000-02-07	2003-04-08
POWER3 Thin			450		2002-01-22
POWER3 Wide	1, 2	POWER3	200		1999-02-01	2000-06-30
POWER3 Wide	2, 4	POWER3-II	375		2000-02-07	2003-04-08
POWER3 Wide	2, 4		450		2002-01-22

Deployments

• The Cornell Theory Center 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, it obtained 88.40 GFLOPS on the LINPACK benchmark.^[8]
• Deep Blue, the first computer to win a chess game against a reigning world champion in a match with Garry Kasparov in 1996.
• ASCI Blue Pacific is a PowerPC 604-based system with a peak performance of 3.9 TFLOPS. It was installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in 1998 as part of the Advanced Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI).
• ASCI White is a 512-node system with a peak performance of 12.3 TFLOPS. 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, 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 9.98 TFLOPS, it obtained 7.30 TFLOPS on the LINPACK benchmark.^[9]

See also

• Blue Gene