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SGI Introduces World's Densest Server
Twirlip of the Mists writes "Today SGI announced the Origin 3900 server, the world's densest computer. How dense? How about 16 MIPS R14000A processors and 32 GB of RAM in a 4-rack-unit 'superbrick,' for a grand total of 128 processors and 256 GB of RAM in a single rack. That makes the new machine the densest single-system-image computer in the world; it's even denser than most blade systems. Just for fun, the server also includes a whole bunch of 64-bit, 133 MHz PCI-X slots (from 11 up to hundreds and hundreds, depending on configuration). There's coverage of the announcement on ZDNet, CNET, and InfoWorld, as well as on SGI's own site."
Good to see a non-Intel compatible platform release something interesting these days. What we need is faster, cheaper hardware that makes sense!
that's the min system spec for Office 2005! start saving now..
Isn't that the system requirement for the up and coming Doom III?
~S
Now where do we find the world's densest admin to run it?
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Every time somebody makes yet another Beowulf cluster joke/reference they make baby IT developer Jesus cry.
---- Anyone can act smart, but it takes a smart person to act stupid. ----
with the Slashdot effect, we'd see how good those processors really are :)
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
"...and more on lessening heat dissipation..."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't you want to *increase* heat dissipation?
Project Steve
Response: The boys that cried "Beowulf!".
This record goes to Emmanuel at the little bistro on Rue de Bach just off Blvd. St. Michel in Paris.
Help fight continental drift.
Stupid servers....getting denser all the time...
({:P for the {:P-impaired)
Moderation: +4. Modded 70% Funny and 30% Overrated. 100% Saturated.
now imagine running the heaviest hardware with the lightest of the light OS...
I meant to mention this in my submission, but it slipped my mind. The R14000A only consumes 17 watts of power. Four of them, plus the Bedrock memory controller chip, plus up to 8 GB of RAM, fit on a board inside a 1 RU clearance. Four of them, plus some nifty backplane hardware, fit into a "superbrick," meaning sixteen processors in 4 RU.
As far as heat loading goes, the "superbrick" is basically one big wind tunnel, with giant fans on the front and ventilation out the back. It pumps a lot of heat into the room, but the temperature in and around the CPUs is really pretty low. I think it peaks around 35 C.
I write in my journal
As someone who has worked with blades, my first question is what they do about heat... Sure the CPU's may run a little cooler, but at that density, what keeps it from melting???
An ounce of perception is worth a pound of obscure
Or Dan Quayle dense?
D'ohe!
Commenting on how the new Origin systems are denser then any other single image system, and then comparing them to the current blade fad to make your point is a bit silly. Blades are seperate machines (unless they are Sun, in which case they are the current desktop line), this system is a single machine. I'm not entirely certain about this density claim either, doesn't Sun fit 128 processors in a rack with the Fire 15ks?
You'd still probably need a beowolf cluster of these things to run the future Quake 3 multiplayer server...
Sig
These servers are pointless in most datacenters. In order to fill one rack with this much horsepower, you would need at least two empty racks next to it to compensate for the power draw and (much) increased cooling needs. I would argue that the target market for this equipment is government labs, research institutes and universities--not usually starved for floor space.
Procter & Gamble, for example, uses an SGI system to study the aerodynamics of Pringle's potato chips
Wouldnt something that dense have a tendancy to try to burst into flames?
At 17 W/processor, not really. According to one of the many press releases, this is using a 0.13 micron version of one of their older processors clocked at something like 600 MHz. I'd worry about the bus chipset heating up more than the processors.
It's interesting to look at the implications of a design like this. Highly parallel systems tend to be communications-limited, and systems that deal with large workloads tend to be memory-bandwidth-limited in general. All of this points to the processor not being the bottleneck. SGI appears to have designed with this in mind, using processors optimized for power instead of performance to improve density.
No, it's not. This is a single-system-image server. The 128-processor rack boots a single kernel. (In fact, you can connect four 128-p racks together to make a 512-p system, and larger systems than that are supported under special contract to SGI. I believe NASA Ames has a 1,024-p.)
The four-processor, 1-unit server you talked about stops there: at four processors. You can't compare that to a system that scales to be 256 times that size.
I write in my journal
You'd have a core meltdown that's hotter and does more damage than most nuclear weapons.
<ducks>
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Today SGI announced the Origin 3900 server, the world's densest computer.
Not if it does't run a Microsoft server product.
*ducks*
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
each processor consumes a reasonable amount of elecricity. why have these never been used in anything other than sgi boxen, and cobalt raqs?... neat processors along with arms of course. too bad the world is stuck in the "my processor is faster than thou" mind set. i had thought some years ago that apple would have been well off buying sgi since they have similar markets at the low end of sgi and at the high end of apple.
How about we calculate density by flops or something else useful. I mean, how difficult would it be to cram a butt load of Pentiums in a rack? Yeah well how much calculation can they do?
... that thing is mamoth with 5,120 processors.
...
... ramble ramble ...
Lets cruise on over to the Top 500 and use their handy dandy html list to view 'most powerful chip'. This unfortunately requires a little calc work because they failed to include this number in their table.
#1 NEC Earth-Simulator 35,860.00 GFlops using 5,120 Processors -- WOW!
But that's only 7 GFlops per processor
Now lets look at a little different design
#14 Hitachi SR8000-F1/168 1,653.00 GFlops using 168 Processors -- Hot DAMN!!
This is more like it. They're pulling 9.84 GFlops per processor. With their architecture they could pull off the Earth-Simulator's GFlop rate with 3,645 processors - That's 28% less computer doing the same amount of work. Which means if the Earth-Simulator had been constructed with Hitachi's hardware, they could have been pulling 50,380 GFlops in the same cubic footage.
Now this is all rambling that assumes that the processors are similar in size. Which probably isn't true. But they are also getting more power out of less hardware, and it is rare that THAT isn't a bonus.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Obviously, that should be 64 gigabytes of RAM, not 64 megs.
Interesting thing about this system will be, rather than the maximum RAM capacity, the minimum RAM required. The original Origin 3000 required some minimal amount of RAM-- 256 or 512 MB or something-- for every four processors. I'm not sure if this new model has the same requirement, but I'd imagine that it does. (It's an architectural thing. Every node board has to have some RAM on it, because that node board may be nominated at boot time to act as the boot master, among other reasons.)
If that's true, then a 128-processor system would require a minimum of either 32 or 64 GB of RAM, depending on whether you can put 256 MB on a node board.
I write in my journal
This is the current generation hardware. Doom II will require _next generation_ hardware.
I don't have a sig...Do you??
(I'm answering these questions off-the-cuff, so if I mistype any details, sorry.)
If you know what a first-generation C-brick looks like, imagine squeezing that board into a one-rack-unit form factor and stacking four of them together.
Each superbrick includes four boards, spaced one unit apart, with four R14Ks, the Bedrock, and some RAM. The boards are connected with an internal eight-port crossbar router, making the superbrick a self-contained 16-processor unit. Externally, the superbrick connects to the base I/O brick via XIO+; the base I/O brick contains stuff like the system disk and the first 11 PCI-X slots.
I'm not positive how the superbricks are configured. Theoretically, you can partially populate them in one-node increments (meaning 4 CPUs and some RAM), but SGI may or may not sell them that way for manufacturing and QA reasons.
I believe the CPUs come with 8 MB of s-cache each.
The CPU-to-CPU and CPU-to-RAM bandwidths vary depending on the topology you're crossing, but I believe the minimum is 1.6 GB/s unidirectional, or 3.2 GB/s bidirectional. Intra-node bandwidths are somewhat higher, I believe.
No, the CPUs are regular single-core MIPS R14000As. They're tiny chips that don't consume much power, so you can really squeeze 'em in there.
Keep an eye on techpubs.sgi.com, because SGI will be releasing the developer and owner docs for the new system there shortly. (By "shortly" I mean as soon as a few hours or as long as a few weeks, depending on when the docs get released.) You'll find all the technical data you want when those docs go up.
I write in my journal
The Origin 3900 is cooled with a Bryant Air Conditioning coil and condenser system.
these things still look cool. I have always liked how SGI boxes look....
I would love to see an SGI server case designed by HR Geiger.
It's amazing that a company that is trying to survive can acomplish such an amazing breakthrough. SGI is on the edge, yet it can push their technology far beyond the competition.
I wonder what SGI could do if it had the same number of employees Sun or IBM has.
I think that, once again, they prove that they can provide the community with cool and kick ass products.
Congrats SGI, this is just amazing... Other companies should follow.
-- Leeeter than leet
www.clustercompute.com
well, on a per mips basis maybe, but then again I could use faster cpu's today.
MP3 Search Engine
I'd also like to mention that I enjoy Subway, despite their lack of 'piping hot grits' as a menu item, and give a shout out to the mods, my paint-huffing homeys keeping it real out there in Internet land.
Sounds like this unit also would be the central heating unit for the office complex in which it resides.
Is this just delaying the death of SGI or signaling a new focus and niche for the company? I loved the Indy stations back in college and the O2's were amazing in their time, but most of the work those systems could do can now be done on comodity hardware, so SGI had to find a new reason to exist. Whether this system is enough to keep the grim reaper away is left to be seen.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I'd worry about the bus chipset heating up more than the processors.
It does. The Bedrock chip is both considerably larger and considerably hotter than the R14000A is. (Bedrock is the memory controller, node crossbar, and "bus" arbitrator.)
As to your other comment, SGI got a lot for their money when they bought Cray back in the mid 90's. They took a lot of good Cray technology-- like crossbar-based NUMA system design principles-- and incorporated them into their large server systems. I believe SGI was the first company-- other than Cray itself-- to break the one-hundred CPU barrier on a single system image. (The T3 series was a monster, but I don't recall exactly how many CPUs you could cram into one.)
I think it was Seymour himself who once said, "A supercomputer is a device for turning compute-bound problems into I/O bound problems."
I write in my journal
Anyone see the large image of this thing. It has like 10 6" Wide cooling fans. Walking by this thing will be like walking by a turbine jet engine. I cant' wait for the readers digest " Sucked in to the Origin 3000 how I survived"
http://www.sgi.com/cgi-bin/download.cgi?/newsro
You got ripped off. I wouldn't take a machine with SI graphics if you paid me $10 to haul it away. Ugh.
I guess you can still use the Octane as a space-heater, though. That's a plus.
I write in my journal
Having the chance to work with a similar machine, I can tell you that the disk arrays (in general) will generate much more heat that the CPU bricks. The CPU bricks a very well ventilated. Hard disks RAIDS (in general) are not so well ventilated and will generate a lot of heat. Maybe they tolerate higher temperature, I don't know.. But it's good though, it keeps a part of the server room a bit warmer when you get too cold :)
We also have a Linux rack and this will get pretty hot too. We had to move the Linux rack next to the A/C blower. I can't really say about other vendors but SGI is doing a good job at cooling their stuff.
-- Leeeter than leet
I remember eading an article on Slashdot some time ago on how processors were becoming so hot that at the current trend, they would be hotter than nuclear reactors by 2025.
When I got up this morning, it was 59 F outside. Now, just after lunch, it's over 65 F. If this trend continues, it will be hot enough to melt lead outside by next spring!
Beware statistical projections.
I write in my journal
From their website: "The RLX System 300ex chassis holds 24 ServerBlades in 3U and supports the new ServerBlade 1200i." -- and it's even based on Linus's Transmeta chipset!
Not sure how Sun's server can top this... somebody help me out here.
That's true-- or at least they did-- but this particular machine is not a cluster. It's a single computer. You can cluster these with your favorite technology, of course, using Myrinet or gigabit Ethernet or what-have-you. ASCI Blue Mountain at Los Alamos National Labs is a cluster of 6,144 Origin 2000-series processors. I guess it'd be the acme of hyperbole to call that system a megacluster, but the name sounds pretty good.
I write in my journal
The US list price for a 128-processor supercomputer with 64GB of memory is $2,937,696.
Will they accept PayPal?
Trolling is a art,
A beefed-up system with 128 processors and 64MB of memory sells for $2.9 million.
Imagine how much the version with 128 MB must cost!
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
Doesn't count. It's not a single system image. The Origin 3900 is. But apart from that, that's a lot of processors in a small space.
I write in my journal
The difference? The SGI is a single system image, i.e one single computer, that can be used as a server. With the RLX solution, you need to configure it as a cluster, with all it's inherent troubles, to be able to do roughly the same thing, and still not have shared memory etc.
Nice Rack!
Sure, if you buy a ton of second-hand peecees and glue them together in a Beowulf, you have lots and lots of flops (= CPU power).
;-)
But the flops are not everything. The problem with clusters is the network latency when the nodes talk to each other. That latency is small for your average network application, but immense for a supercomputer trying to make all its CPUs talk together. This is why there are entire classes of problems that cannot be solved properly on clusters (non-parallelizable problems).
As opposed to that, an SGI supercomputer has the inter-CPU latency orders of magnitude lower. Same GFlops per total (same CPU power), but certain problems are solved orders of magnitude faster.
That's the power of latency.
Whoops, I breezed over that qualification for densest server.
I stand corrected.
Check out Nvidia's data centers. Beware... windows media format warning.
Notice how many times the word linux is used...
Compare this to the 1U Hammer racks that are coming out http://www.newisys.com/NewisysDataSheet.pdf
for a 42U rack, you have 84 processors, with each processor being about two and a half times faster, SPECint2000 1202 vs. 483 and SPECfp2000 1170 vs. 495, with the Hammers in 32bit mode. Each 1U Hammer rack can contain up to 16 GB of memory, which gives a total of 672 GB of total RAM, compared to the 256GB of the Origin 3900. I also wouldn't be surprised if a 42U rack of Hammers ended up costing more like $300,000 than $3,000,000
I have been told-- not officially, but close to it-- that when SGI divested itself of MIPS, it retained all the IP surrounding the R10000 family, which includes the R10000, R12000, R14000, and R14000A, and the rumored R16000, R18000, and R20000 lines. So while MIPS makes more RISC processors than anybody else in the world, only SGI has the rights to develop and produce the really cool ones.
I write in my journal
Oh, don't exaggerate. It's closer to 7 times lower. Well, maybe 8. ;-)
I write in my journal
Don't worry, when the economy is in the shitter, there's always your regular three-letter agency to buy those supercomputers. ;-)
Today SGI announced the Origin 3900 server, the world's densest computer. How dense? How about 16 MIPS R14000A processors and 32 GB of RAM in a 4-rack-unit 'superbrick,'.
The server may be SGI's densest, but at least as far as processing power, it is not the densest. As a counterexample, the above configuration has four processors per unit. Many vendors sell 1U Athlon servers in which each unit holds two dual Athlon systems (four processors per unit), and I can assure you that an AthlonMP 2200+ is quite a bit faster than a MIPS R14000 @ 600MHz.
True, those two Athlon systems aren't a single server, but we're talking density here.
Regardless, SGI does have the Athlon beaten hands down on memory per unit.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
There are entire classes of problems which cannot be solved fast enough on clusters, but only on single-image systems. Anything that cannot be made into a parallel algorithm falls into that category.
With networked clusters you're always going to have latencies, orders of magnitude higher than with single-image supercomputers.
Sure, perhaps in 10 or 15 years, we're going to have network latencies as small as those of a PCI bus, but i'm not really talking about future that far. Until then, clusters will be slow for certain problems. Deal with it.
You'll be able to buy the Origin machine (or something like it) for $999.99 at walmart.
-ted
Well, in all fairness, SGI is still selling the hell out of Fuel and Octane2. And, unless they've cancelled their plans in the last few months-- a distinct possibility-- they've got something new and interesting coming down the pipe. Code-named Chimera, it's supposed to apply the same principles of scalability and modularity to a single-user workstation that they applied years ago to servers and supercomputers. So SGI's workstation business isn't dead, per se, they're just scaling it back to where it needs to be. I don't think you'll ever see another SGI PC. Thank heavens.
I write in my journal
That's not really fair; while these machines may be useless for running most modern 3D apps, they're still bitchin' X terminals. The latest version of Irix will run great on those things, and the OS and GUI are so smooth overall that the reduced horsepower isn't really a bother. They aren't for everyone, but they're wonderful machines for people who care more about stability and polish than speed. (Some say the same about Mac OS X, but I've found it has far more annoying hangups than Irix does.)
That's a cluster, not a single-image supercomputer. Read again the coments to this article on Slashdot, there are many explanations why a cluster, no matter how many CPUs you throw at it, will never be able to solve entire classes of problems fast enough; to do that, you need a single-image computer, like the SGI stuff.
Last time I went to a "sales pitch lunch" for SGI stuff in PA a few years ago, I realized I didn't need to buy SGI equipment to do the low-end stuff our company was doing (3d rendering, multimedia....etc). SGI was catering to the low-end and couldn't compete there. Intel and MS were more cost competitive. Needless to say, we bought nothing from them.
The high-end scientific guys were drooling over the Origin machines....and were willing to fork out for the processing power. This should have been a clue to the SGI product planners. I think they are better reading their markets now and this type of focus may actually save SGI.
-ted
It seems that massively parallel computing has gone the way of the Dinosaur what with the advent of more powerful CPUs. But I read that Danny Hillis of MIT and Thinking Machines fame had built a supercomputer called the Connection Machine which housed 65,536 procs each of which lived on the same wafer with dynamic ram and were arranged in a 16-dimensional hypercube array. I don't think the old beastie had nearly as much ram as the new SGI (of course, this machine was 80's vintage). But depending on the physical size of the old box, could this have not been the world's densest computer ever?
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
I hate to be a dick, but dense(st/r) isn't a proper word. More Dense, Less Dense, Most Dense.
It just bothers me when people use poor grammar.
The change you've noticed is due in no small part to a shake-up at the very highest levels of management. Rick Belluzzo, while he was a decent enough guy personally, really had some screwed-up ideas about what the company ought to be doing. He saw SGI's competitors as being Dell and Compaq and, to a certain extent, Apple. In fact, SGI's competitors were, and are, companies like NEC and, in a way, Cray itself. Rick thought too small, and nearly killed the company in the process.
I write in my journal
Well, no. Most FPS wouldn't scale linearly on multi-processor machines anyway (nor do they have support for more than one CPU). IIRC, Quake III supports SMP but only gets about 30% better performance with the second processor enabled.
The more you know, the less you understand.
It must take a lot to cool it, which would make it pretty loud.
;-)
Yes, it's pretty loud. It's also six feet tall and bright purple. Wanna talk about what it smells like?
Some people have an uncanny way of zeroing in on the most irrelevant aspects of things.
I write in my journal
SGI's MIPS chips are engineered to generate magnitudes less heat than Intel or AMD chips. Itanium cores throw 130W or so, whereas SGI engineers all of its cores to fall between 15 - 20W. And if there's one thing SGI knows, it's how to engineer a case. I have an Origin 200 sitting at home, and that thing has enormous heat sinks on each of the CPUs along with three industrial sized fans pushing air through.
e;
I don't know much about hardware, but wouldn't this be a bit of a pain to sort out if one of the components blows?
Just how much experience exactly do you have with SGI hardware?
I routinely work with tens of SGI machines of many different types, as well as Linux on Intel (Dell hardware), Sun, etc. And if i were to make a relibility comparison, SGI is the most reliable. Far more reliable than the Wintel/Dell crap anyway.
If that's true, then a 128-processor system would require a minimum of either 32 or 64 GB of RAM, depending on whether you can put 256 MB on a node board.
You can put up to 32GB on a node board/CX brick, a max of 8 CX bricks per rack makes for 256GB per rack, up to 1TB in a 512cpu system (4 racks). Not sure what the minimum is.
I see lots of errors and misunderstandings here. Apparently people have a hard time understanding tech. that is not in thier PC.
NUMAflex is the coolest concept in systems architecture today. I'm eager to see some trickle down into lower-end markets.
Read this before you post:
John Mashey's excellent NUMAflex paper.
I dunno, the waiter at lunch was pretty dense....three times for the order.....
This is the hardware requirements for the next generation of MS Windows... This info must have leaked to SGI. SGI leads the way!
Client:
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: densestserver.sgi.com
Server:
Um... What's that?
Client:
Do you not understand HTTP 1.1?
Server:
Of course I do...?
Client:
Well then,
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: densestserver.sgi.com
Server:
Okay... Would you like that biggie-sized?
Client:
wtf?
Server:
Oh, you want a web page. Okay, I get it now.
Client:
Great. Now send it, please.
Server:
Send what?
Client:
*sigh* Nevermind.
User:
Huh? What does "500 Server Error: Server too dense" mean?
I'm not going to get into an argument about processors. Your assertion that the R10000 needs to be retired is unfounded and bogus, and not even worth discussing.
The much vaunted scalability of these systems is also quite questionable.
Okay, you're kind of talking out of your ass now. I've personally seen code slam a 768-processor machine. (It was nothing more complex than an image processing demonstration. SGI's ImageVision software library is hand-coded to parallelize across all available processors. Run ImageVision on a machine with 8 processors and you'll see it run on all 8. Run it on a machine with 768 and you'll see it run on all 768. In the demo, the program did a 5x5 convolution on an image of truly gigantic proportions, 100K by 100K pixels, or something.) Companies like SGI build giant-- or what we would consider giant-- computers because people need them.
MPI (which will run very nicely on a cluster), can get you into the hundreds of CPUs of scalability.
Maybe. But with a single system image, you can scale to tens of thousands of CPUs using nothing more complex than sprocs or pthreads. And you don't get shot in the butt by inter-node bandwidth or latency shortcomings.
Just because you can add processors, doesnt mean the system "scales". Scaling is one of those fast and furious marketing terms that has an actual meaning attached to it, but you have to wipe away the marketing fluff to find it.
I hear what you're saying. You seem to be implying that this system doesn't scale, by your definition. Yet you fail to explain what that definition is, exactly. Indicting the whole concept of single-system scalability isn't going to earn you any points here.
I write in my journal
Yes, NAS at ames should have the 1024p cluster up by now. When I was interning there three years ago (yikes, was it that long??) they had a 512p cluster up, and it was the first of its kind. There was a port of doom that would run on the LCD status panels on the front of it... let me tell you, there's nothing quite like playing doom on a multimillion dollar hunk of iron.
Ok, so it was damn near impossible.. but amusing nonetheless.
Let's be clear. These are not clusters. These are single system images. Clusters are composed of a number of separate computers-- each running its own kernel, with its own address space and its own storage-- that can be used together for certain purposes. The computers you're talking about at NASA are single system images, with one running kernel and one address space. A program running on a 1,024-processor system can use one processor, or some, or all 1,024 at the same time merely by spawning sprocs or pthreads, or by calling library code that spawns sprocs or pthreads.
The chief advantage to the developer of programming for a single system image rather than a cluster is that one doesn't have to use an abstraction tool like PVM or MPI to parallelize one's code. The other big advantage is that single system images are always faster than clusters of identical capacity and processor count.
I write in my journal
NUMAflex Modular Design Approach
Quote:
SGI's "NUMAflex" (TM) modular design approach builds computer families
with unusual scalability and evolvability characteristics. It partitions
CPU, I/O, and other functions into small, 19" rackmount computing "bricks",
then combines them via efficient, high-speed cache-coherent cabled interconnects,
rather than large backplanes.
It looks like the 3900 is just a repackaging of the 3800, so the benchmarks should be the same.
O3K is a single-image system. Go back to reading the theory please, or stop posting nonsense.
Your intuition is somewhat correct regarding latency penalties for access to "remote" memory versus "local" memory in a NUMA system. However, while a Sun *Fire has a latency penalty of 10:1 for such cases, an SGI O3K has a 1.5:1 "penalty"; hardly a penalty at all. Most people do not bother at all about latency; in those rare cases when people try to optimise for NUMA "remote" memory access, they do that for reasons of bandwidth, not latency (like, backing up 1TB in one hour
Please read this article for more info:
NUMAflex Modular Design Approach
Also remember that Mosix has latency penalties many orders of magnitude worse than NUMA. Difficult to overcome that.
Not to mention that many problems are "almost parallel" - that means there's a need for heavy data exchange between nodes all the time (many weather prediction algorithms, etc.); with those, no matter how smart your programmers are, you just can't workaround a bad latency in a typical cheap network cluster (Beowulf, Mosix) - you simply need a true single image NUMA system like an SGI O3K.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
Wrong, the CRAY-Link was an SGI invention, the ccNUMA architecture and crossbar based Origin architecture was designed build and ready to ship BEFORE SGI bought CRAY. Buying CRAY was a highly questionable move. The Origin would have killed a lot of CRAY's business and SGI sold their sparc based product design to SUN anyway. SGI ended up with a purchase that would have been their growth opportunity, they could have TAKEN huge parts of CRAY's business instead they bought it and the overheads that went with it. SGI never properly rationalized the businesses and joined the orgamizations after that, and they put a complete ass of a Cray manager in charge of the entire company. SGI beat CRAY into submission and instead of killing them, rescued them and put some of their failed management in charge. Dumb bastards.
RLX Technologies has a server based on Transmeta Crusoe chip and it can hold 24 CPUs in 3U space, giving 336 processors per rack (and 336GB of RAM and 27TB of HDD :)
See promo here..
- Raynet --> .
You're closer than you might realize, except for the part about the low end. SGI might have plans for a new low-end workstation in that price range, but if they do I'm not aware of it, and I can't say I'd be happy about it if they did.
But for the new stuff... think about the Origin 300. Just read the tech documents on it, and think about it for a little while.
I write in my journal
Hot damn!
I have to give up my firstborn to pay for heating my appartment, so I don't turn on the heat, and it's a nice and warm 4 C in this room. For you fahrenheit people - your fridge is probably warmer.
Set me up with some ear muffs, and I'll move into that server room in the morning!
Hey - if they install water cooling, do you think they'd mind if I hooked it up to a swimming pool or something? It'd be nice with an indoor 35C swimming pool!
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.