But while the Exalogic system is for running middleware and the Exadata machine for data warehousing and online transaction processing, the SuperCluster is designed for general purpose computing, including standard enterprise resource planning applications.

The machine includes four Sparc T4 server nodes, each with four sockets; Infiniband switches; ZFS storage appliances; and Oracle's Exadata storage servers. It can be purchased in a half rack configuration, or as a full rack with 4TB of DRAM and up to 198TB of hard disk space.

Up to eight racks can be linked together with a single system image, Ellison said. "This is a very big machine," he said.

Some of the components overlap with those in the Exadata Database machine. But the SuperCluster has less of Oracle's specialized database storage servers and adds standard storage instead. It also devotes more space to compute power.

"You can add more Exadata storage cells in a second rack if you want to ... but the original rack trades a certain amount of Exadata storage for general storage, to be a more general purpose system," Fowler said in the interview.