7.1 Hardware and software overview

Hardware and software supported for pSeries running Linux are discussed in 2.1, "Before you install" on page 7. You can also find similar information from the following Web site:

http://www.ibm.com/servers/eserver/pseries/hardware/linux_facts.pdf

From an HPC point of view, the following points may be of special interest:

• All POWER4 or POWER4+-based systems are supported. This includes p615, p630, p650, p655, p670, and p690, providing a whole range of systems from entry level workstations to enterprise servers.

• All of the following Gigabit Ethernet adapters are supported on all supported pSeries hardware:

  - 5700 Gigabit Ethernet - SX PCI-X (Fibre)

  - 5701 Gigabit Ethernet - Base-TX PCI-X (UTP)

  - 5706 Gigabit Ethernet (UTP) 2-port

  - 5707 Gigabit Ethernet (Fibre) 2-port (in our case study for HPC)

• Myrinet PCI-X-based adapters (the most recent generation) are supported, providing low latency, high bandwidth network connectivity.

• IBM's proven Fortran compiler (XLF 8.1), C and C++ compiler (VACPP 6.0), Engineering and Scientific Subroutine Library (ESSL 4.1) and its parallel distributed memory version (PESSL3.1) are supported. This not only provides high performance to pSeries Linux applications due to its POWER4 architecture affinity and its Symmetrical Multiple Processor (SMP) scalability, but also provides great convenience as follows :

  - For AIX users transitioning to Linux, since all these products are originally from AIX and their usage is almost the same as in an AIX environment.

  - For 32-bit application programmers embracing a 64-bit world, because these compilers and libraries support both 32-bit and 64-bit application space.

• GNU gcc/g++/g77 for 32-bit and cross-compilers for 64-bit are also available. In addition, much open source software popular in the HPC world has been enabled and is available as RPM packages.