Specs On New SGI Onyx And Origin

An anonymous reader wrote in to tell us that SGI has announced their latest and greatest MIPS-based computers, the Onyx and Origin 3000 line. Up to 1 TB RAM and 512 processors, all on a single system (not a cluster). Beyond Boxes has a nice summary, too. This is definitely a great system for anyone who wants to have their computer be the size of several refrigerators ;)

Comments

Four interesting facts about O3000 series

[foobar104]

1. The CDROM is on an internal FireWire bus.

2. The system disk is Fibre Channel.

3. SGI hasn't made a big deal about it yet, but the system will accept either MIPS or Intel processors in the same CPU modules. The MIPS processors come on one kind of daughtercard, and the Itaniums (Itania?) on another. You can't mix-and-match MIPS and IA-64 CPUs in the same machine, but you can mix-and-match in the same cluster.

4. The IA-64 based versions of the 3000 series will include the Linux kernel along an some IRIX compatibility layer.

It is definitely not a cluster, it's NUMA

[warrior]

The whole system has one contiguous view of memory. The NU means "non-uniform" as in the memory access time is non-linear. If a process's memory is located on the processor module it's running on, the memory access is fastest. If it has to jump one module away, the memory access time increases by 100 nanoseconds (roundtrip). Architecturally, it's completely different than anything Sun has to offer. Sun has been promising a NUMA mahcine for years and still hasn't delivered. The closest company to SGI is Compaq(DEC), and there top of the line offering can almost compete with Origin _2000_. All other companies high-end servers use symmetric multiprocessing, which becomes limited as more and more processors try to access the shared memory bus, ultimately bringing in negative returns as you add more processors. This NUMA architecture incurs very little (if any ) penalty by ading more processors, as long as the hardware and OS do a good job of placing processes and memory (keeping them physically near). Also, the machine is _not_ limited by 512 processors. To give an example of the power of this box, a company has certain calculations that they run day to day. On their top-of-the-line Sun hardware, it takes about seven hours. On O3k, it takes seven seconds! What does being a modular system have to do with being a cluster? By being "modular" it simply means that you can plug in more of whatever you want, whenever you want. I believe you can even mix faster cpu modules with existing ones as they become available, protecting your investment. This is not a cluster.