The Fujitsu/Siemens PRIMEQUEST 500

We only discuss here the PRIMEPOWER 540 and 580 as the smaller model, the 520 has the same structure but less processors (maximally 4). The PRIMEQUEST is one of the many Itanium-based machines that are offerred these days. The older 400 series that is on the market for less than a year is now replaced by the 500 series that contains the dual-core Montecito variant, or Itanium 9000 as it is named officially. As the clock frequency is 1.6 GHz the peak performance is just over 200 Gflop/s for a model 540 and about 410 Gflop/s for a model 580.

The proprietary network to build clusters of the 540 or 580 nodes are not offerred unlike that is the case for the PRIMEPOWER systems (see the PRIMEPOWER) probably because the PRIMEQUESTs use a standard Linux distribution for an operating system instead of the Solaris variant that Fujitsu employs on the SPARC64-based PRIMEPOWER systems. So, when one (or Fujitsu) is prepared to build a large configuration based on the PRIMEQUEST one would have to use a third party network like Infiniband, Myrinet, or Quadrics.

Just like the PRIMEPOWER and the related SUN Sunfire systems, the PRIMEQUEST is not a cc-NUMA machine but a SMP system where all processors have equal access to the common and potentially large memory. Such a choice dictates a modest amount of processors (32 maximum here) and a high-speed crossbar. The latter requirement is fullfilled by a full crossbar with an aggregate bandwidth of 136.4 GB/s for the PRIMEQUEST 580.

Obviously, the compiler suite provided by Intel is used on the processors and therefore will there be virtually no difference between a single processor of the PRIMEQUEST and other Montecito-based systems. Only in parallel OpenMP and MPI programs the differences should show.

Fujitsu tries to stand out with respect to other vendors in offerring failsafe systems. For instance it is possible to have the crossbar doubled. Would one crossbar fail, the other would take over without interrupt of service thus securing the safe completion of the active tasks. Apart from the second crossbar also other components can be doubled, of course at a price, to make the system highly reliable.

Note: Large HPC configurations of the PRIMEQUEST are not sold in Europe as they are judged to be of insufficient economical interest by Fujitsu-Siemens.