Node Architecture and Performance Evaluation of the Hitachi Super Technical Server SR8000

A new architecture for the Hitachi super technical server SR8000 has been developed. The performance of the SR8000 is 8 GFLOPS in each node, which is a RISCbased SMP, and 1 TFLOPS when up to 128 nodes are connected with an interconnect network. A node of the SR8000 provides a new COMPAS (CO-operative MicroProcessors in single Address Space) architecture and improved PVP (Pseudo Vector Processing) architecture. COMPAS provides rapid simultaneous start up of all microprocessors in a node. And PVP provides stable and high data-reference throughput even when the node processes a larger data set than the cache size. These architectures result in the node performance equivalent to that of a vector processor. The new features of COMPAS and PVP are inter-processor communication and multiple outstanding prefetching. We evaluate the node performance of the SR8000, and compare it with that of the Hitachi predecessor vector processor, S-3800. And we demonstrate that the SR8000 has superior node performance than that of the S-3800.