Superdome Partitions (new)

HP-UX 11i is the first operating system release for the new Superdome platform. Superdome systems' hardware and firmware and HP-UX 11i allow a system to be configured into multiple partitions that consist of one or more cells. A cell contains a maximum of four CPUs, a maximum of 16GB of memory, plus I/O bridges and peripherals.

Adding cells to, or removing cells from, a partition will require a reboot. This allows the system administrator to designate a new configuration at any time before the reboot, after which the new configuration will take effect.

Superdome partition technology increases the flexibility of system workload management of a large system while maintaining the benefit of application protection, as if running on separate small systems. Configuring partitions is done with the Partition Manager Graphical User Interface or from a new set of commands (see partition(1)). Partition Manager can be launched from sam, directly from the command line using the /opt/parmgr/bin/parmgr command, or from a PC web browser.

Other key HP-UX support for the partition architecture is included with the Superdome configuration commands, Superdome kernel support (machine dependent code), and PCI Card Online Addition and Replacement (OLAR).