NEC reveals Itanium 2 plans

NEC will this week unveil its forthcoming 32-way Itanium 2 platform, the TX7

NEC will this week brief UK partners and the press on the progress of its forthcoming 32-way Itanium 2 system, called the TX7.

The platform can support supercomputing applications such as vehicle design and weather forecasting, and will be the first 32-way Itanium 2 system, according to NEC. It is expected to ship in January.

But NEC said it will only offer support for Linux and HP-UX. Though the TX7 can run Windows .Net Server, NEC does not provide support services for the operating system and does not plan to do so. NEC Europe said it will be pitching this system as a supercomputer - rather than promoting it as a mainstream high-end business system - and Windows is not mentioned in any of the TX7's promotional material.

Jorg Stadler, marketing manager at NEC European supercomputer systems, said, "The TX7 runs HP-UX and Linux, and our main target is Linux. We are not focused on business computing in Europe, although NEC US is selling the TX7 into the mainstream market."

Cost-effective

Stadler argued that while clusters of workstations are best for some applications, others are better run on a single supercomputer such as a TX7. "Clustering is the most cost-effective solution, provided the application is suitable for this approach," he said. "The key question is whether the task can be broken into smaller, independent subtasks. Weather forecasting uses Fourier transforms, and these by definition must touch all the data in the model, so it does not work well on clusters."

Because NEC is selling the system as a supercomputer rather than a high-end business server, it suggests that NEC Europe does not see a viable market for 32-way Itanium servers. NEC's US subsidiary has already submitted the system for benchmarking by the Transaction Processing Council (TPC), where it now occupies the third position in the TPCC price/performance index of non-clustered systems, indicating that it is a competitive high-end system.

Although the platform uses Intel's Itanium 2 processor, NEC designed and manufactures the TX7 chipset itself.

The chipset plays an important role in defining the capabilities that differentiate the system. In this case, the TX7 uses a non-uniform memory access (Numa) design supporting a maximum 128GB of RAM and delivering a theoretical peak performance of 4Gflops.

The system can be partitioned into eight sections, each of which would run a separate instance of operating system and applications. Such capabilities would be valuable to firms wanting to consolidate the workload of several disparate servers in a single high-performance server environment.

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