What types of HPC architectures are available?
There are three major architectures that are produced by a variety of vendors, and each has the ability to work extremely well in different types of environments. SMP systems (Symmetric Multi-Processor) use large groupings of high-end RISC processors that share a single large memory space. SMP systems allow the use of OpenMP and MPI directives to parallelize sections of code. These systems are ideal for problems that have large memory requirements. The ARL DSRC has two types of SMP systems: the large single system image and clusters of large SMP compute nodes. The SGI Origin 3800 and Altix 3700 are examples of the single system image. SGI has used a propriety technology known as ccNuma to allow each processor to access any memory, regardless of physical location within the system. The IBM P3 and SP4+ are examples of clustered SMP systems. Each system has a large number of processors per node (8, 16 or 32) and is clustered to give the user access to larger amounts of processors, each wi
