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

IA64s are kickass...

[Telek]

I had an opportunity to work on them about a year ago (the first one we received was a doorstop, literally... The sucker weighed 73 pounds in it's shipping package (I'm NOT KIDDING... They reeled the box in on a trolly, and I laughed at the guy cuz it looked small enough to carry, but then I tried to pick it up...) and didn't even boot, but intel shiped them with 2GB of ram and a kickass SCSI system, so let's just say that my desktop became a SWEEEEEET machine.), but once we got ones that did work, they were sweet machines. I was porting bigint libraries for encryption that I had hand-coded in assembly for the x86 platform, and going from 8 general purpose registers with 1 predicate register (i.e. only 1 carry flag) to having 128 general purpose registers, and 63 predicate registers was a GODSENT.. AMAZING... For anyone who's coded math routines in assembly, you know how much of a PITA it is having only one carry register. This was simply amazing. I could do 1024-bit RSA purely in registers, no memory access outside of the initial read of the data and the final write. Needless to say it flew. It was interesting because literally you wouldn't need a hardware crypto card if you have an Itanium system. So basically Intel really put in a lot of good effort into designing this new platform to avoid the pitfalls of the problems that they experienced with their x86 architechture.

The machines also had 4GB of ram, so it was fun to do:

char * myStr = (char *)malloc(-1);

and have it succeed! (that's a 4GB memory allocation)