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New SGI Altix 3000

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the heavy-metal dept.

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)."

2 of 225 comments (clear)

  1. Signs of desperation? by brejc8 · · Score: -1, Troll

    You can see SGI is getting desperate. They have dropped their MIPS systems and IRIX. They dont want to aim be the best around when they can just packahe other peoples stuff. Soon you will be able to see SGI PCs running a microso~1 OS and made with all standard parts. shame

    --
    Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
  2. SGI processors.. by J+x · · Score: -1, Troll

    The SGI processors shouldn't be viewed as general
    purpose processor like the P4 or Athlon. For
    specific floating point intensive problems, they
    can be quite effective. What is annoying is that
    they are usually 2 or more generations behind in
    manufacturing process capability. So the lines
    and heat dissipation in the 3GHz P4 are much more
    advanced than the Altix 3000.

    Also, SGI has an annoying tendency to use
    proprietary ASIC's in the their memory which
    make their entire system much more expensive
    than it need be. Some of this is because
    their design cycle is so long that when SGI
    committed to a architecture, the performance
    just wasn't there.

    Given these constraints, it is hard to see
    how SGI could market "cost-sensitive" systems.