HP Ranks "Best in Class" in IDC's New HPC Benchmark

-- In two out of four categories, HP crushes rivals in comprehensive test --

HP has walked away with top honors in two out of four categories in a new, more comprehensive standard benchmark test recently conducted by IDC, the world's leading provider of IT analysis and market data. The HP Superdome rated "Best in Class" in the Enterprise Server Category and the HP rp8400 ranked "Best in Class" in the Departmental Server Category. Outstanding results in the areas of performance, memory system capacity, and scaling capability allowed HP to dominate competitors including SUN, IBM, Compaq, and SGI.

IDC's rankings are based on a new standard called The IDC Balanced Rating. The improved test, developed with extensive input from the high-performance computing (HPC) community, is significant because it is a more accurate benchmark of the overall capabilities of computers.

"Despite the strategic and economic importance of supercomputers, there has been no widely accepted standard for evaluating their performance," said Debra Goldfarb, IDC group vice president, Worldwide Systems and Servers. "It is not uncommon for user organizations to find that the actual performance of a new, multi-million-dollar supercomputer is a small fraction of the stellar results produced on today's limited tests."

The products were categorized into four market segments based on overall pricing:

• Capacity - systems purchased to solve the largest problems.
• Enterprise - systems sold for $1 million or more.
• Divisional - systems sold from $250,000 to 999,000.
• Departmental - systems sold for less than $250,000.

The PA-8700 HP Superdome with 256 CPUs won the top position for the Enterprise category of high-end servers, computers typically shared by hundreds or thousands of users and carry price tags of $1M or more. The new PA-8700 HP rp8400 with 8 CPUs ranked first in the Departmental category, computers that are usually shared by engineering work groups and range in price from $50K to $250K.

The new IDC benchmark is based on the most important factors necessary in solving computationally intensive problems in areas such as engineering design and analysis, modeling and simulations, and biochemical research. "These tests more accurately reflect real world experiences on actual workloads for a wide range of technical users," explained Steve Joachims, Marketing Manager, High Performance Computing, Technical Computing Division at HP. "We are thrilled that HP has been recognized for providing the industry with 'Best in Class' computing systems."