ENGINEERING
An Interview with HP’s Steven Joachim on His Firm’s SC2001 Presence
By Steve Fisher, Editor In Chief -- HP always has a strong presence at the SC shows, so Supercomputing Online sat down with Steven Joachims, Market Development Manager, HP Technical Servers/Technical Computing Division for a brief chat. Topics include the Top500 list, Superdome and the big show.
Supercomputing: Hi Steven, thank you for the interview. How's your show going thus far? JOACHIMS: Attendance at the show this year appears to be very close to expectations, and interest in HP has been excellent. This show tends to bring out many of the movers-and-shakers across the HPC community, and that in turn provides a natural incentive for the decision makers across industry and the public sector to make the effort to attend. Supercomputing: Some HP information I received recently mentioned that HP had replaced Sun as the number two vendor on the Top500 list. Please elaborate on this statement a bit citing specifically how HP accomplished this move against Sun. JOACHIMS: The TOP500 listing shows Superdome to be a superior enterprise-class server for mainstream high performance computing in industries such as manufacturing, government/defense, life sciences and more. As a fully integrated high-end server, SuperDome provides buyers in the engineering enterprise with a unique combination of performance, scalability, and manageability. Why are SUN and IBM's presence on the list shrinking? With nearly 100 GFLOP/s of performance in a single 64 processor system, SuperDome has dramatically raised the bar on the performance requirement for entry to the TOP500 list. Many of SUN's and IBM's installations which qualified for the list last year simply didn't make the cut this time around. Supercomputing: What are one or two areas or technologies HP is really focusing on? JOACHIMS: We have a number of innovations that yield direct benefits in performance, scalability and manageability. Two of HP's truly significant technologies that translate to highly visible impacts for high-end computing are: * HP's new DNA Memory Subsystem - a scalable interconnect technology for HP platforms which was introduced with SuperDome and shared by new midrange systems such as the recently announced rp8400. DNA technology simplifies the entire interconnect subsystem down to a single ASIC, with dramatic results in scalability and performance for HP's high-end systems. * Over a very short timespan, HP has quadrupled the multiprocessor scalability of our high-end server product line (from 16 to 64 processors in a single system). Technological advancements in core HP-UX subsystems - such as the memory management subsystem and the high performance filesystem - have kept pace with these top-line hardware enhancements. The results are demonstrated in benchmarking exercises where SuperDome stands out in delivering near-linear scalability on throughput tests consisting of massive compute-intensive and IO-intensive job mixes. ---------- Supercomputing Online wishes to thank Steven Joachims for his time and insights. ----------
Supercomputing: Hi Steven, thank you for the interview. How's your show going thus far? JOACHIMS: Attendance at the show this year appears to be very close to expectations, and interest in HP has been excellent. This show tends to bring out many of the movers-and-shakers across the HPC community, and that in turn provides a natural incentive for the decision makers across industry and the public sector to make the effort to attend. Supercomputing: Some HP information I received recently mentioned that HP had replaced Sun as the number two vendor on the Top500 list. Please elaborate on this statement a bit citing specifically how HP accomplished this move against Sun. JOACHIMS: The TOP500 listing shows Superdome to be a superior enterprise-class server for mainstream high performance computing in industries such as manufacturing, government/defense, life sciences and more. As a fully integrated high-end server, SuperDome provides buyers in the engineering enterprise with a unique combination of performance, scalability, and manageability. Why are SUN and IBM's presence on the list shrinking? With nearly 100 GFLOP/s of performance in a single 64 processor system, SuperDome has dramatically raised the bar on the performance requirement for entry to the TOP500 list. Many of SUN's and IBM's installations which qualified for the list last year simply didn't make the cut this time around. Supercomputing: What are one or two areas or technologies HP is really focusing on? JOACHIMS: We have a number of innovations that yield direct benefits in performance, scalability and manageability. Two of HP's truly significant technologies that translate to highly visible impacts for high-end computing are: * HP's new DNA Memory Subsystem - a scalable interconnect technology for HP platforms which was introduced with SuperDome and shared by new midrange systems such as the recently announced rp8400. DNA technology simplifies the entire interconnect subsystem down to a single ASIC, with dramatic results in scalability and performance for HP's high-end systems. * Over a very short timespan, HP has quadrupled the multiprocessor scalability of our high-end server product line (from 16 to 64 processors in a single system). Technological advancements in core HP-UX subsystems - such as the memory management subsystem and the high performance filesystem - have kept pace with these top-line hardware enhancements. The results are demonstrated in benchmarking exercises where SuperDome stands out in delivering near-linear scalability on throughput tests consisting of massive compute-intensive and IO-intensive job mixes. ---------- Supercomputing Online wishes to thank Steven Joachims for his time and insights. ----------