IBM released the world's fastest UNIX computer with 5 GHz processors

IBM has announced the release of two high-performance models of the Power Systems line — one of them is the world's fastest computer running UNIX, and the other is a supercomputer with a unique water cooling system.

The new UNIX-server enterprise scale Power 595 (the first snapshot), which configuration includes 64 processor cores and up to 4 TB of RAM, twice the performance of the similarly configured HP Superdome Itanium, at a comparable price.

The new supercomputer Power 575 (Hydro-Cluster) is designed to solve the most demanding of computing resources tasks, such as modeling in the field of energy, aerospace and meteorology. A feature of this system is the water cooling system, which made it possible to increase the density of the layout to 448 cores per one rack (in the second shot, one of the Power 575 modules).
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As part of these systems, POWER6 microprocessors that operate at record high frequencies — up to 5 GHz — are available to consumers. According to IBM, these processors are two to three times better than microprocessors used in comparable HP or Sun systems.

The features of the Power 595 server, in addition to the 5-GHz POWER6 processors, include high-speed internal connections made according to the symmetric multi-processor point-to-point SMP. These connections connect the cores in 8-core nodes formed by dual-core POWER6 processors, combined into modules with direct connections between the cores. At the next hierarchical level, nodes are connected in a “superlinear-scalar” way, meaning that each added node is connected by point-to-point lines to all existing ones, so that 28 connections between eight nodes are formed in total. This allows you to maximize throughput and unleash the potential of the cores, cache and RAM. The aggregated memory bandwidth in the Power 595 exceeds 1.3 TB / s.

Power 595 shipments will begin May 6th.

Source: IBM