UNICC has acquired a 64 processor SGI Origin 2000 server with 10 GB of memory and around 100 GB of local disk space. Its R10000 processors from MIPS together with a new and promising memory architecture enable the machine to deliver exceptional performance for both serial jobs and large parallel jobs.Unlike most other parallel machines, the Origin server is not based around a single shared memory bus. Instead, pairs of cpus share a connection to a local memory (256 or 512 MB on our machine), and all 32 local pieces of memory are connected by a high-speed network called the "Cray-link interconnect." Serial jobs normally only access the local memory, so the latency of the memory accesses can be kept very low (around 300 ns). However, each processor can address all of memory directly, and hardware cache coherence mechanisms make sure all cpus see the same memory contents at all times. In this way the machine looks like a shared memory machine to the programmer.
The SGI server shows excellent performance on a large selection of parallel benchmarks like SPECrate95 and the NAS version 1 and 2. According to these benchmarks, our machine competes very well with the SP2 computer "strindberg" at PDC.
If you want to read more about the Origin server, the following manuals are available on-line:
Lennart Bengtsson