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)."

Comments

SGI is still in business?

[yppiz]

What is keeping SGI afloat? Service contracts on existing machines?

--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu

Re:SGI is still in business?

[yppiz]

Thanks for the suggestion. So I did take a look, and the answer to the question "how are they staying afloat?" is "they aren't. They are steadily hemmorhaging money."

I posted my question because, as early as 1996 or 1997, it was clear that commodity machines were going to kill SGI. I'm just amazed that they're still alive.

Here's their income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement. As of today, For three out of the previous four quarters, they had sales growth (sic) of -20% or worse. The three analysts who cover this stock have a hold rating, which in analyst-speak means sell.

--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu

Why Linux?

[HeelToe]

I still don't understand why SGI has foregone such a great OS as IRIX. Why go with Linux? Just trendy, or does it really offer advantages for scientific computing?

MPI?

[Alex Belits]

even myrinet and mpi is glacial compared to the SGI numalink network and running code multithreaded

Don't mix shitty parallel computation libraries and actual performance. Multithreaded applications without MPI are, of course, faster than anything with MPI, however it says absolutely nothing about:

1. Multithreades vs. multiple processes.
2. Myrinet
3. Network programming
4. Clustering
5. NUMA implementations that reduce everything to SMP with a cache that gets flushed a lot