The IBM RS/6000 SP is a UNIX system that is currently the largest technical computer in terms of processing power. It is also the machine that defeated Kasporov in chess and held web serving records at one time. It is a key component for many e-commerce environments such as Schwab and FedEx, There are currently over 40 SPs installed in Southern California.

At the UUASC June meeting, John Engel of IBM will tell us about the RS/6000 SP in some detail. He will explain the SP architecture and design objectives, symmetric multi-processing (SMP) versus massively parallel processing (MPP), parallel application execution on the SP (including parallel databases), and UNIX system management on the SP. He will also give us examples of SP environments in e-commerce, data mining, server consolidation, technical computing, etc.

John Engel is the IBM SP specialist in Southern California. He has been with IBM for over ten years, supporting UNIX products. Before IBM, he was in software development in the aerospace industry.