Slashdot Mirror
New SGI Altix 3000
dlloyd writes "SGI has just publicly announced the Altix 3000 series of computers that can scale from 4 to hundreds of processors, with up to 64 processors per single system image. Processors each come in a C brick that has 4 CPUs. I/O is done though IX and PX bricks (12 PCI slots per brick, IX bricks have a base I/O controler and two ultra 160 disks inside), just like on the Origin 3900 series. Anything more than 8 CPUs (2 C bricks) is connected by R bricks, which route the NumaLink packets between nodes. The NumaLink network is good for an aggregate 6.4 gigabytes/sec to *each* node. That scales as you add more C and R bricks. Basically, you can think of this as SGI's origin 3000 series, except that it runs Linux and has Itanium2 processors. The performance and scalability is like nothing that has ever run Linux and is *far* ahead of the competition. For those of you who wonder why anyone would need a 64 processor Linux machine, many scientific and technical customers prefer running their code on large, single system image machines. Large single system image machines are also less labor intensive to maintain and admin, plus they work much better on code that needs to share memory and pass messages between threads (even myrinet and mpi is glacial compared to the SGI numalink network and running code multithreaded)."
Revenue: $1.3 billion for fiscal year 2002
servers accounted for 38% of fiscal 2002 revenues; Global services, 34%; Visual workstations, 18% and other, 10%
To answer your question, the revenue from the sales of services is only about one-third of their total revenues. I don't know if this is considered a lot or not.
IBM has a similar report: global services accounted for 41% of 2001 revenues. This is before the purchase of PWC, so it is probably going to be higher in 2002.
Yeah, you're wrong. This isn't a beowulf, it's a multiprocessor box. It runs standard software. That means you don't have to re-write everything to support clustered solutions.
Lots of people don't understand that a 1024-processor beowulf won't run battlefield 1942 (if you've ever played it, you understand what I'm talking about), because it's not like a 2-processor workstation box. You have to write your software so that discrete pieces can be offloaded to other nodes and have the results posted back. A beowulf cluster is similar to SETI@Home or whatever distributed computing project you like. Though the interconnects are faster, the general idea behind how the software works is similar.
With this SGI system, it's like a 2-processor workstation on steroids. You can run standard multi-threaded code on it and actually use 1024 processors (and could possibly run battlefield 1942).
Now that I've RTFM, let me correct my previous comment -- The Altix3000 runs a single Linux image over up to 64 processors and 512 GB RAM. After that, it's NUMA.
It can, however, do high-speed shared memory over all nodes in the cluster, allowing you to store HUGE shared data sets. Here's a link to the info on the memory.
SGI's Altix machines use Itanium 2 CPUs (up to 150 watts per CPU). They have **VERY** advanced cooling subsystems. This is not the MIPS/IRIX Origin series, this is the Itanium2/Linux series.
This is a well-known practice. Here is what Forbes has to say about it:
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
Well the Altix 3000 is using Intel processors. You seem to be a bit confused on your comparisons. You can replace processors in this system as fast as Intel can spin a new chip.
The other thing is that the Altix 3000 is using standard PC memory (either PC2100 or PC2700) and their 200MHz variant in the near future.
And yeah, the machine costs more than your white-box cluster, but you get what you pay for - the fastest interconnect and global shared memory WITH scalability.
No, because $/MIPS is a misrepresentation. Heck, MIPS alone is meaningless, because all it does is take a theoretical maximum of CPU speed. MIPS doesn't take into account anything beyond CPU speed - like memory speed, backplanes, drive arrays, etc.
If you have heavily interrelated datasets, like in just about any thermal dynamics/plasma/weather problem, then there is so much interdependancy between adjacent "cells" that each work unit needs information from adjacent work units constantly. Spread that system out on a cluster solution and you're DOA because your communications between boxes are horrendously slow, with latencies measured in milliseconds instead of nanoseconds. So while you may have some absurd number of MIPS, the reality is that the CPUs are sitting idle 90% of the time waiting for data from some other CPU/memory block.
Take all those CPUs, all that memory, put them in a single box and do the backplanes and memory interfaces right (this is where the cost comes in by the way) and your latency becomes reasonable and you actually get all those MIPS.
It boils down to what the problem set is. If you need an obscene amount of transactions or have a highly interdependant problem set then you're better off with a single large box. If you can break up the problem set and minimize interactions then clustering is your friend.
There's also the issue of maintainance, and while the hardware costs may be lower for a large cluster, the time spent fixing the hundreds of boxes may kill you. Have a single box that's designed for redundancy and you'll pay a fortune for the support contract, but you won't spend an appreciable amount of your time on hardware support on the rare occasions it actually needs something.
From the Register
Well,
My understanding is that the Itaniums do not contain a 32bit instruction set. That being true then if it were released today on PC motherboards it would most likely not have an operating system to run on. You could run Linux but not M$ Windows. Now to this crowd that might sound nice but to the masses it would be useless. AMD's hammer does have backward compatibility to the 32bit X86 instruction set... so one could run M$ Windows 32 bit until there was a 64 bit version and still use that machine to run enhanced 64bit applications and/or operating systems.
Just my 2cents...
Nick Powers
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
In Intel's mind, the Itanium doesn't compete with the Opteron. Opteron will be at Xeon's throat, trying to tear up some of the 95% market share that xeon has in corporate and other mid-range servers.
The above comment is a cut-and-paste from the R16000 story.
Does this thing even run Windows?
No.
On the other hand, Linux has two things which give it a better name that IRIX; it's open/free, which is obvious, and it's new, so it has an excuse to have some 'issues'. Meanwhile IRIX was around a long time and still horribly, terribly insecure. It's not worth it to me to dress up Unix prettily and easy to use in exchange for security; I frankly want both.
Linux is also growing in leaps and bounds and implementations using it like this one only serve to prove this; support for vast numbers of processors is one place Linux has traditionally flailed, but as time goes by and manufacturers expend more money on making Linux scale, the last few blocks to running the same OS on a PDA and a supercomputer (IE, from a common, unpatched codebase) are going away. That is undoubtedly powerful because your code will (theoretically) work on any platform large enough to contain it with nothing more than a recompile.
Granted, there are attempts to do that at the application level rather than the OS level -- and I'm talking about Java and .NET here -- But they fit a somewhat different need, and they will likely never be as compatible between disparate platforms as having the same operating system underneath your program (duh.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Those prices really aren't bad. $70,000 for 4 cpu's and 32GB of ram is almost exactly what we paid for our 4 cpu 32GB Sun V440 a couple months ago and this thing has more cpu power and a lot lot lot more expandability. $1.1 million for 64 cpu's is pretty cost competitive with Sun and IBM too.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
"I'm afraid of these sudden changes in the direction of, let's face it, trendy technologies. Linux still has to prove itslef in systems with many CPUs."
This is not so sudden, they've been planning such a change for many years. Some of their delays have been tied to Intel's delays. SGI has had large development systems based on Itanium for a long time. And they've been trying to improve Linux (with some resistance) for some time.
"There really isn't any reason to chose Linux over IRIX, performance-wise."
Except that SGI has tied Linux to IA-64 at a certain price point. If you want a large SGI IA-64 system then you're stuck with Linux. If you need IRIX &/or > 64 CPUs in a single image system then you should buy an Origin.
It was determined a long time ago that porting IRIX was way too costly and complicated.