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IBM System p5 575

The IBM System p5 575 server has been withdrawn from the market, effective August 29, 2008. The learn more links provide information on the p5 575.

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Highlights

  • 8- and 16-core off-the-shelf cluster nodes
  • Powerful POWER5+ processor cores with extraordinary memory bandwidth
  • Ultra dense, elegant packaging with innovative cooling features

The p5-575 outstanding performance potential results from several factors:

  • IBM’s powerful POWER5+ processor core
  • IBM’s packaging technology, which connects the eight or 16 POWER5+ processor cores with a wide, high-speed fabric
  • Use of highly interleaved flat shared memory, which enables high sustained memory bandwidth

The IBM System p5 575 cluster node is designed to excel at high performance computing (HPC) applications for organizations involved in engineering problem solving, drug design, oil reservoir modeling, weather forecasting, financial simulation and business intelligence (BI). Use it in clustered configurations of as few as 16 CPUs or in world class supercomputer configurations of more than 2,000 processors.

The System p5 575 features a choice of two powerful nodes. An 8-core node includes dual-core 2.2 GHz POWER5+ processors with only a single core active. Each processor core has access to 1.9MB of L2 and 36MB of L3 dedicated cache for HPC and BI applications. Also available is a 16-core node built with dual-core 1.9 GHz chips that have both cores active. In this case, two processor cores share access to the same L2 and L3 cache. Although per processor cache and memory bandwidth are less, the 16-core node achieves up to 60% more floating-point performance 1 for HPC applications than the 8-core node.

The p5-575 offers ultra-dense packaging; no other IBM POWER5™ processor-based system can match the extraordinary density achieved with nearly 200 CPUs in a single footprint (12 p5-575 16-core cluster nodes packaged in a single 24-inch system frame). Compared to its POWER4™ predecessor, the System p5 575 POWER5+ cluster node delivers substantially higher packaging density; compared to its POWER5 predecessor, it delivers substantially higher sustained performance for HPC applications.

Specifically, the System p5 575 cluster node provides:

Common features

  • 24" system frame packaging
  • 8- and 16-core symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) design
  • 64-bit POWER5+ technology
  • Mainframe-inspired RAS features
  • Dynamic LPAR support
  • IBM Advanced POWER™ Virtualization 2 feature (option)
    • IBM Micro-Partitioning™ technology (up to 160 micro-partitions)
    • Shared processor pool
    • Virtual I/O Server
    • Partition Load Manager (IBM AIX 5L™ only)
  • One optional I/O drawer
  • Operating system support via AIX 5L (V5.2 or later) and Linux® distributions from Red Hat, Inc. (RHEL AS 4 or later) and SUSE Linux (SLES 9 or later)
  • IBM HACMP™ support for near continuous operation*
  • System Cluster 1600 support with Cluster Systems Management software*
  • IBM eServer™ pSeries® High Performance Switch and 4x InfiniBand Switch support

Hardware summary

  • 2U rack-mount drawer in 24-inch system frame packaging
  • Eight 2.2 GHz or 16 1.9 GHz 64-bit POWER5+ processor cores
  • 15.2MB L2 and 288MB L3 cache per node
  • 1GB to 256GB of DDR2 memory
  • Two hot-swappable SCSI disk bays for up to 600GB of internal storage
  • Two Ultra3 SCSI controllers
  • One optional I/O drawer adds an additional 20 PCI-X slots and 16 disk bays (up to 2.3TB additional)
  • Compute node configuration: Two dual 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet ports; two HMC ports
  • I/O node configuration: Two dual 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet ports; two HMC ports; RIO-2 hub port for optional I/O drawer; four hot-plug/blind-swap PCI-X adapter slots (64-bit/133 MHz)
  • Optional 2 Gigabit Fibre Channel, 10 Gigabit Ethernet and 4x InfiniBand Switch adapters

1 Based on SPECfp_rate_base at www.spec.org as of September 1, 2006.
2 Not supported on AIX 5L V5.2
* Available as separately-priced software product

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