The supercomputing industry has entered a frenzy of activity in anticipation of the beginning of the SC2002 supercomputer show in Baltimore, scheduled for 18 November. On Thursday, Cray announced its new X1. In addition, SGI improved its top-end systems with the release of the Origin 3900 on Monday. Earlier, AMD -- known mostly for building processors popular with consumers -- announced it is building a system at Sandia National Laboratories. For its part, IBM is steadily gaining ground in the market for supercomputers, with major customers in the defence industry, in corporate research and in academia. However, Hewlett-Packard is also making a strong showing, both with its high-end systems based on technology it acquired from Compaq Computer and with numerous lower-end systems. HP is also exerting pressure on its supercomputer rivals with systems based on Intel's Itanium processor, which HP helped to design. "Itanium 2 hasn't made a big splash in general, but if you had to pick one area where it has gained some traction, it's in high-performance computing," Illuminata's Haff said. Though IBM also is embracing Itanium, much of its energy is devoted to its own Power4 chip. IBM packs four Power4 processors into a dense chunk of ceramic and wires called a multichip module, a technology taken from its mainframe line. Each Power4 chip actually has two processors, making it a "dual-core" chip. However, to build four-processor systems out of multichip modules that actually have eight processors, IBM disables one of the processors in each pair. Disabling half the chips might sound like a waste of silicon, but the technique has advantages in some circumstances because a single processor can exploit the double-strength infrastructure, such as communications lines and high-speed cache memory. IBM's new p655 systems can be joined with the company's high-speed SP Switch 2, a technique that makes it easier to spread supercomputing calculations across a cluster of computers. McGaughan said IBM expects roughly half of its p655 customers will use the high-speed switch, with the remaining clients linking their systems with the slower and more pedestrian Ethernet networks.
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