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SGI Installs First Itanium Cluster At OSC
Troy Baer writes: "SGI and the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) have announced the installation of the first cluster using Itanium processors. The system consists of 73 SGI 750 nodes, each with two Itanium 733MHz procs and 4GB of memory, connected by Myrinet 2000 and Ethernet. Software includes Linux/ia64, SGI's ia64 compiler suite, MPICH/ch_gm, OpenPBS, and Maui Scheduler."
Unfortunately, this seems to mark Intel's latest attempt to push an overpriced, substandard product at us. The P4 was crippled from the begining and is only just now begining to show any promise. The PIII at 1.13 and 1.2 Ghz is finally available 8 months after the recall of their failed 1.13 processor. Even their purchase of Alpha from compaq seems to be just stock propping because the original creators of the alpha are now working for AMD. The reason Compaq was willing to sell in the first place is the second generation alpha has been subjected to over three years of delays because they simply did not have the engineering talent to improve a ten year old design.
The talented engineeers are working for AMD, built the athlon and are working on the sledgehammer.
Before anyone jumps to Intel's defence, like they need defending as long as they are the 800 pound gorilla, keep this in mind:
Craig Barret warned "This was a year of record annual revenue and earnings; yet, slowing economic conditions impacted fourth quarter growth and are causing near-termuncertainty,". He was faced with AMD going from 10% market share to 34% market share in a year. Wall street took barret's word as gospel that the entire market was in decline and not just Intel's market share. Intel is a market bellwether so we all got laid off. Just so Intel would not have to admit that AMD had a better product. Nasty business. Intel does not have a great product and they are reckless with their power.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Hey, never give up hope! Remember how Borland changed their name to the laughable "Inprise" some time ago? They're back as Borland now. Companies want to please their customers, and if enough want some part of the old SGI back they'll get it.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
there is a much larger cluster of linux machines going to be created care of the NSF. press release here. good day for linux!
The MIPS architecture has run out of gas. All it has left in it is a few more speed bumps. SGI has no money to invest in something that would succeed the MIPS chip. Another note: Why did Compaq dump the Alpha chip ? Because it can't run lock-step, so it cannot be used for Compaq NonStop (formerly Tandem) processors. McKinley chips apparently can be run lock-step, so they will be used for the new NonStop systems.
It wouldn't be worth mentioning, since you can't cluster more than four nodes with W2k Datacenter. When you compare that to this cluster of 70+...
You're thinking of "Rocket" Rick Belluzzo, former CEO of SGI. He was responsible for putting MIPS/IRIX on hold, courting the Wintel crowd, and the "sgi" logo. He successfully put SGI in a steep nosedive they'll probably never recover from.
d efault.asp
Where is Mr. Belluzzo today?
Hold on to your hat...
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/belluzzo/
Well, not exactly. The Indy is a blue pizza box. The Indigo2 was a much larger turquoise/grren box, and the Indigo2 Impact (which had tons of problems, BTW) was the same box in purple.
I should know - I have an Indy and an Indigo2 ;)
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
So you guys know, Myrinet is a 2Gb peak interconnect with a 7us minimum latency. FULL CROSSBAR SWITCH :-) Fiber or serial.
A interesting fact is that up until a few days ago, Myrinet only supported 1 GIG systems. I ran into this while setting up the University of Nevada beowulf named cortex.
I must admit, IA64 with Myrinet 2000 is gonna kick some serious computational ass.
The article says that Myrinet will run MPI, but it will also run PVM and TCP/IP stuff too.
Check it out at their site