The enhanced IBM eServer™ pSeries® 655 server applies the latest IBM POWER4+™ chip technology in a building-block approach to the requirements of high-performance, clustered technical and commercial computing. With the speed advantages provided by the powerful 1.7GHz POWER4+ processor and its associated system architecture, a fast system bus, extremely high memory bandwidth and robust input/output (I/O) subsystems, the pSeries 655 (p655) today provides the greatest sustainable memory bandwidth per fully populated rack1,2 of all non-vector, clustered servers. Newly available support of the Linux operating system, extraordinary performance on a wide range of industry standard benchmarks, and enhanced clustering alternatives combine to make p655 a versatile solution to the most demanding client requirements.
The pSeries 655 is a 4-processor or 8-processor symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) server. Multiple pSeries 655 servers can be configured in distributed clusters. Up to 16 pSeries 655 servers can be contained in a single 24-inch IBM frame, providing leading-edge performance in a very dense package. Building on over a decade of IBM RS/6000® SP™ supercomputing experience, the pSeries 655 is ideal for computationally-intensive and data-intensive workloads in science, engineering, business intelligence and data warehousing. This paper describes the pSeries 655 server, including its excellent performance3, extreme scalability and flexible configuration options.
1 STREAM benchmark results published as of January 27, 2004 at the STREAM Web site: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/stream.
2 The HP AlphaServer ES47/ES80/GS1280 peak theoretical memory bandwidths are quoted at: http://h18003.www1.hp.com/alphaserver/download/html/
es47_es80_gs1280_ts.htm
3 Source: www.spec.org/cpu2000/results/rfp2000.html – as of January 27, 2004; pSeries 655 8-way 1.7GHz results submitted to SPEC and are awaiting approval
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