• 8- and 16-core off-the-shelf cluster nodes
• Powerful POWER5+ processors 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
• IBM’s packaging technology, which connects the eight or 16 POWER5+ processors 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+ microprocessors with only a single core active. Each processor 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 processors 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 performance1 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 delivers substantially higher packaging density; compared to its POWER5 predecessor, it delivers substantially higher sustained performance for HPC applications.

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
• Advanced POWER™ Virtualization feature (option)
  • Micro-Partitioning™ technology (up to 160 micro-partitions)
  • Shared processor pool
  • Virtual I/O Server
  • Partition Load Manager (AIX 5L™ only)
• One optional I/O drawer
• Supported by AIX 5L (V5.2 and V5.3) and Linux® distributions from Red Hat, Inc. (RHEL AS 4 or later) and SUSE LINUX (SLES 9 or later) operating systems
• Cluster 1600 support with Cluster Systems Management software
• IBM eServer pSeries® High Performance Switch and 4x InfiniBand 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+ processors
• 15.2MB L2 and 288MB L3 cache per node
• 1GB to 256GB 533 MHz 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 adapters