8 IBM ^ Cluster 1600 Managed by PSSP 3.5: What’s New
High performance cluster interconnects
Cluster 1600 supports two generations of high-speed interconnect switch
hardware to connect cluster nodes together: the SP Switch and the SP Switch2.
Although primarily aimed at the HPC customer, these interconnects support IP
and thus can be used as a high-bandwidth LAN for purposes of backups,
database connectivity, or other bandwidth-hungry applications. In addition, some
databases, such as the parallel implementation of DB2, are designed to run a
query across multiple nodes in a cluster simultaneously, with each node
accessing a subset of the relational tables required for the query. These
databases can make use of the switch interconnect for f