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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)."
Yup, IRIX was good, but maintaining a full OS takes a lot of money. This way, they can piggy-back on investments made by other people & companies while still having a modern OS. They've already integrated XFS into linux, and it wouldn't surprise me to see other SGI/IRIX technologies coming into linux in the same way. Similarly, IBM have migrated JFS into linux.
Scientific computing has allways been SGI's niche. They unfortunately stumbled around the time that Belluzzo took the helm and wasted the entire internet bubble recovering from the mess that caused.
It's great to see that they're finally back and doing some really serious new stuff.
It's a shame though that they won't be running the AMD 64 bit chips, although, I'll be someone is looking into that.
Congrats SGI !
These machines support 512 GB of RAM in one chunk. A Linux cluster might outperform this thing, but you'll need to chunk your data up to fit into the individual nodes' memory. Sometimes this can be a pain in the neck to do, hence the market for something like this.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Having worked on IRIX, I can say that Linux moves much faster and IRIX will eventually fall behind in features simply because the investment is huge.
When SGI bought Cray and then started the fatal Win32 effort, it was obvious that they were not going to be able to make it succeed without increasing the cost dramatically.
Customers also want Linux now, with IBM pushing Linux, customers want a simpler maintenance strategy. Large outfits with a heterogenous network running AIX, IRIX, HP-UX etc is harder to maintain that a heterogeneous network all running Linux.
One thing that I have always liked about SGI systems, is that not only do I get a high performance system, but I also get something that looks good design wise. Other companies, such as IBM give me the feeling that I am buying, in equivalent terms an F1 car with the body of a Lada. If I pay top of the line prices, I also like to have something nice to show off.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Why would SUN and HP have to release a version of linux on their high-end systems?
SUN cost for Solaris wouldn't be higher than SGI to port Linux to their systems.
It would seem that people producing high-end systems costs would go down, using a no-cost license fee os like Linux.
You guys are all missing the main point!
SGI is the first billion-dollar systems vendor to move their totally high-end million dollar hardware to run Linux, and not just to run Linux poorly, but instead their mega-boxes *require* Linux to performe excellently (unlike, say IBM "Linux/390" mainframes where Linux is not really the native OS supporting all the hardware features and is mostly a curiousity or very expensive Apache server.)
The other vendors, Sun, HP, DEC, IBM have not been nearly as aggressive and are depending on their own UNIXes to remain on their high-end boxes.
SGI is depending on Linux and has tweaked it enough to run huge, 64-way complex NUMA systems. This is a major infrastructure bet on Linux, and (assuming this is a shipping, working product) a huge mark of progress for Linux that it can, today, support this sort of high-end scalable hardware.
We all knew it *could*, in theory, but SGI has invested in making sure that *it does*!
This marks a major shift of SGI to an Intel/Linux pure play. It's not just a bunch of low-end Linux server boxes (which they've done before, and Sun/HP/IBM also do), or boxes that you can run either Linux or some proprietary UNIX. It's a full-scale massive 64-way NUMA SMP server that is optimized to run Linux.
Hats off to SGI, I say.
(I wish they had better business prospects but its hard to do that with a niche sort of product like high-end SMP/NUMA technical computing. We'll see if they can push it into a broader customer base with sufficient application support.)
I wonder how Oracle would do on this sort of puppy?
--LP
...and you thought you were joking. "Lego Hardware" was an internal code name for this machine, and the Origin systems at one point. Rumor was that they wanted to use it publicly but LEGO(tm) objected. Not sure if the rumor had any truth to it, though, since the name was dropped before I started working for SGI/Cray.
Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
Of course, what the manufacturers want is something that is expensive to obtain, and almost impossible to maintain without an expensive support contract :)
Seriously, Linux is cheap now, with the inexpensive talent around. What prevents most companies from deploying Linux is the (perceived) lack of quality *commercial* support (i.e. someone they can sue when something goes wrong :P)