| Machine type | ccNUMA system. |
|---|---|
| Models | NovaScale 5080, 5160. |
| Operating system | Linux, WindowsServer 2003, GCOS 8 |
| Connection structure | Full crossbar |
| Compilers | Intel's Fortran 95, C(++) |
| Vendors information Web page | http://www.bull.com/servers/intel/itanium2/main.html |
| Year of introduction | 2002. |
System parameters:
| Model | NovaScale 5080 | NovaScale 5160 |
|---|---|---|
| Clock cycle | 1.5 GHz | 1.5 GHz |
| Theor. peak performance | 48 Gflop/s | 96 Gflop/s |
| No. of processors | 8 | 16 |
| Comm. bandwidth | ||
| Point-to-point | --- | --- |
| Aggregate | --- | --- |
Remarks:
The availability of the Itanium 2 has spurred some vendors that are traditionally not active in the HPC business to try their hand in this area. One of these is Bull that markets its NovaScale ccNUMA SMPs with up to 16 nodes. The documentation from Bull is not very detailed with respect to the architecture. So, information about the bandwidth and latency of the interconnect is not available, nor the speed with MPI.
A distinctive feature of the NovaScale systems is that they can be partitioned such that different nodes can run different operating systems and that repartitioning can be done dynamically. Although this is not particularly enticing for HPC users, it might be interesting for other markets, especially as Bull still has clients that use their proprietary GCOS operating system.
The Bull documentation hints at the possibility of clustering NovaScale systems into very large cluster systems with tools developed by Bull. However, there is no information about the network employed. So it is impossible to assess the possible virtues of such clusters. A smaller systems, the NovaScale 4040, with 4 processor is also available as a departmental server.
As Bull employs the Itanium 2, the Fortran 95 and C compilers from Intel are automatically available. Bull's documentation gives no information about other HPC software that might be available.
Measured Performances: As yet, no independent performance results are available for the NovaScale systems.