The effort supporting the Olympics represented the first operational use of such capabilities. The system has been demonstrated doing actual forecasts at the last several American Meteorological Society and Supercomputing conferences as well as a number of other venues Example results are available for you to examine . It was also adapted for use at the China Meteorological Agency in Beijing , where it was installed in May 1997. Each node has an SMP configuration and is packaged in one or more frames. A node can have two, four, eight or 16 Power3 processors at 375 MHz.
Wide nodes have additional expansion slots compared to thin nodes.
High nodes have larger cache, increased memory bandwidth and additional slots compared to wide nodes. The frames are either short or tall. Short frames can have a mix of thin or wide nodes while tall frames can also accomodate high nodes. Alternatively, a tall frame may have up to 8 wide nodes or 4 high nodes. These nodes communicate with each other by sending and receiving packets through the SP Switch.