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."

Comments

5.86 Gflops per processor

[Perdo]

5.86 Gflops per processor (We can assume marketing fud value) at $3,300 Compared to the Athlon 1.4 with a peak of 1.37 Gflops (benched value) for $145. Keep in mind the nifty PCI card that has 4 G4 processors on it. That would make for 92 processors at 1Gflop each in just one box.

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.