From: scfacct@bu.edu
Subject: IBM p690 to go into production

Dear Researcher,

After a successful Friendly User test period, we are ready to bring our 
IBM p690 system into production use for the entire community. Starting on 
Monday, September 9, 2002, the IBM p690 system will be available to all 
researchers who have accounts on the IBM SP and SGI O2K systems.  At that 
time you will be able to access the p690 using the same login name and 
password that you use on our IBM SP and SGI O2K systems.  Also, as soon 
the machines are in production all CPU time will be charged against your 
allocation as described below.

Our p690 system is a 96-processor cluster of three independent machines:
twister.bu.edu, pogo.bu.edu and frisbee.bu.edu.  Twister has been designated 
for interactive logins, as well as for running some jobs submitted via the 
batch system.  Pogo and frisbee are devoted exclusively to batch processing.
Each of these three machines consists of thirty two Power4 processors running 
at 1.3 GHz.  These thirty two processors share 32 GB of memory.  The combined 
performance of the entire p690 system is 500 GFLOPS, versus approximately 
75 GFLOPS for the 192-processor SGI Origin complex.  We have found that most 
applications run approximately five times faster than on the SGI O2K.  Because 
our allocations are based on a System Unit (SU) which is equivalent to one 
CPU-hour on the O2K, when accounting we will consider one CPU-hour on the p690 
to correspond to 5 SUs.  Thus your allocation will be charged five SUs for 
each CPU-hour used on the p690.

There are new batch queues which run jobs on the p690:
    p4-short             one processor,   2 CPU-hour time limit
    p4-long              one processor,  32 CPU-hour time limit
    p4-mp16              16 processors,  64 CPU-hour time limit
    p4-mp32              32 processors, 128 CPU-hour time limit
(note that in addition to the CPU-hour time limit, each of the
multi-processor queues also have a 5 hour wall clock limit).

There are some differences between the SP and the p690 of which you should be 
aware:
    1) The SP and the p690 are running different versions of the operating 
       system.  The SP is running AIX 4 (currently AIX-4.3.3) and the p690
       is running AIX 5 (currently AIX-5.1).  While executables built on
       one machine may run on the other, there are cases where this is not 
       true.  This may be somewhat affected by compiler options - for help
       with compiling, see the Repository web page (URL below).  To make 
       the two machines consistent, we will upgrade the SP to AIX 5 as soon 
       as it is feasible.
    2) Matlab does not presently work properly under AIX 5, thus
       does not work properly on our p690.  We expect that Mathworks
       will address this problem, but we do not have a date for this.
       It is possible that there are other applications which have specific
       problems running under AIX 5 on the p690s.  If you notice any 
       unexpected behavior, please send mail to help, e.g., help@twister.bu.edu.
    3) As with the IBM SP we require the use of ssh to login to the p690. 
       Telnet, which is much less secure, is not permitted from non-SCV
       machines.
    4) The charge for CPU usage is higher on the p690 than on the SP.
       As described above, a CPU-hour on the p690 will count as 5 SUs
       against your allocation (whereas a CPU-hour on the SP
       counts as 2 SUs against your allocation).

The following documents are available on our Web site:

    http://scv.bu.edu/SCV/p690.html       - IBM p690 Information for SCF Users
    http://scv.bu.edu/SCV/IBMSP.html      - IBM SP Information for SCF Users
    http://scv.bu.edu/SCV/IBMSP/FAQs.html - BU SP and p690 FAQ page
    http://scv.bu.edu/SCV/IBMSP           - BU SP and p690 Repository

These two IBM web-documents may also be of interest:

    http://commerce.www.ibm.com/content/home/shop_ShopIBM/en_US/eServer/pSeries/high_end/690.html
    http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/pseries/hardware/whitepapers/p690_hpc.html

As usual, any problems or questions on the use of the system may be sent to 
help (help@twister.bu.edu).

We are very excited about bringing our newest machine into production and hope
you will be able to make good use of this resource in furthering your research.

Sincerely,
Glenn Bresnahan