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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)."
What is keeping SGI afloat? Service contracts on existing machines?
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
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?
IX, C and R bricks
The more expensive his LEGO gets...
Tournament Management Online &
Imagine a... Bang!
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
Is that something you would like to share with the class, Altix?
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.
I just got my copy of Linux Journal, what, a week ago, and you guys are just now reporting on this? You didn't even steal your "news" from the right source!
--sdem
I rather like the concept of this...no more trying to pair up older processors when you run across a board someone is getting rid of a few years down the road. I recall getting a couple dual-PII workstations a year or so ago, and finding a pair of matching (and working) processors to put in them was hell...this way I could have just searched Ebay or my parts stash for a single old part.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
I don't do this for a living, but it seems that $/MIPS is the only benchmark even worth discussing, so shouldn't one be able to put together massive clusters of boxen to do the same thing, only without the SGI price tag?
Correct me, because I'm almost certian I'm wrong.
ceci n'est pas un sig.
SGI did make Intel-based workstations that ran Windows NT/2000 that used all standard ports (ATX motherboard layout, Rambus memory, AGP video, et al)... particularly the 550 workstation. They also made several workstation lines that used proprietary memory and graphics subsystem that also ran Windows NT.
For a time... didn't SGI repackage Intergraph workstations as their own? They also had an Itanium 1 workstation that was nearly identical to HP's and Dell's Itanium 1 workstation... but I don't think many of those were ever made.
Just curious, but did anybody notice an estimated price for various configurations either the 3300 or 3700? I couldn't find any price info on their site.
The futexes are also cursed!
I was just about to post this.
/. is posting one advertisment a day (or thereabouts) as a news item. Today, it's this. Yesterday, it was the cool-your-pc-into-the-wall company.
We all know
Does anyone else feel a disclaimer, or flag, or something should be used to mark these news-vertisements? Maybe a new topic icon?
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
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.
With all those bricks invovled, maybe they should call it the SGI Tetrix.
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
As Linux gets into high-end systems, it will drive the industry to compete. Allmost certainly, Sun and HP will have to release high-end systems with Linux rather than trying to keep it on low-end only. Otherwise, it will be SGI and IBM only
Now, If a major would start using Linux in an innovative way rather than simply trying to lower their costs. That would help drive real sales.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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.
The three analysts who cover this stock have a hold rating, which in analyst-speak means sell.
Huh? I thought in anyalyst-speak that "hold" meant hold, and that "sell" meant sell. What does "buy" mean, hold? What does "sell" mean, buy?
I'm glad I read your post - all these years I've been misinterpreting these ratings
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SERENITY NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1. Post article to /.
2. ???
3. Save your job!
mstyne: real name, no gimmicks
This is a well-known practice. Here is what Forbes has to say about it:
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
ALl these years you actually have, he is correct. For a variety of reasons, most centering around their own personal and corporate gain in the long term, analysts almost always overrate companies. Here's the usual rundown:
1) When you see a Strong Buy rating, that means they are directly benefitting from this company's performance, and would like you to make them richer please. Sometimes it actually means the company will do well, or some mix of the two, but it's hard to tell.
2) When you see a regular Buy rating, that means the company is pretty neutral with a possibly good outlook maybe. Translate this as a hold leaning towards a buy.
3) When you see a Hold rating, that means dump this stock like the plague.
4) When you see a Sell rating, if you're still holding the stock you're already screwed and it doesn't matter when you do at this point.
11*43+456^2
Stop trolling, and stop being dumb.
They haven't dropped IRIX or MIPS.
They aren't repackaging anyone elses stuff - this is still the most advanced hardware platform in existance, and who do you think it was that made Linux non-laughable on > 32 cpus (check for all the kernel work sgi has done)
Finally, SGI _used_ to sell x86 boxes running NT, and has since quit. And even then, they were nonstandard parts.
Basically, everything in your post was wrong, except maybe the part about SGI getting desperate, and how what has happened to SGI is a shame.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
The NewsForge link does mention the price for the 64-processor SGI Altix 3000. And the answer to your question is, if you need to ask you cannot afford it.
Give them a break. They're just doing what they have to do to keep this website open so you ungrateful misfits can have a collective place to post your anti-business, anti-money postings.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
From the Register
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:
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
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.
Of course, if the investing public at large learns this, then the analysts will have to readjust their ratings, introducing a new one - "Extra Strong Buy" that simply means buy, while "Strong Buy" will mean hold, "Buy" will mean sell, and so on.
And once the public catches on to that, . . .
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SERENITY NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Not foregone, by any means. Irix is still offered to customers. It's only logical, since Irix is the _only_ Unix variant that can run on a 1024 CPU single-image system. Yes, i am aware of the IBM and HP systems with a similar number of CPUs, but those are not single-image, those are partitioned into many separated smaller systems each one running it's own kernel.
Irix can run a single kernel on 1024 CPUs simultaneously. It's the only one, until now. Linux can do only 64.
Who cares? Would you have felt better if I had submitted it (I would have if I had noticed the press release sooner) or if some AC had done so?
This is News for Nerds. Groundbreaking stuff for Linux in terms of perfomance and scalability. Article already written at Newsforge about it. As long as the editors post interesting stories, who cares who submitted it? Isn't this better than a story about how Microsoft did stupid thing X today?
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
its no shame, its just a way to go.
:) just like i got a nice very cheap SGI indigo2 now at home :)
i think its a wise choice, SGI can do two things, die or stay alive, this will keep them alive for the moment.
And i love to have some old SGI box with 64 cpu's after they arent in use at the nearest company any more
SGI like all server companies cannot drop their customer base suddenly and leave then stranded. They will carry on developing IRIX and MIPS systems and softly let them die. Just like HP with Alpha read this (funny) also shame.
Yeah they have done a lot of stuff for Linux and the boxes do contain lots of their own stuff but its a large step down from making their fully own hardware (very novel stuff) and Irix down to using Itanics and doing Linux hacking.
When a company gets down to that level and gives up their uniqueness then they are no longer special (in my hart anyway).
Afterall there is no end of companies about to release multi intanic systems.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
The above comment is a cut-and-paste from the R16000 story.
You can use the 64-processor version for not only the simulation of, but also for the real-life purpose of melting iron. A double Itanium2 HP ZX6000 is heating up my office like no computer before. When I turned the ZX6000 on, my daughters' self-made art (taped on the wall) started flapping in the warm air. To me it looks like Itanium2 is server room hardware, at least until we get the 130 nm version.
-- Imperial units must die --
intel is taking advantage of being the first (between them and AMD) to being a 64 bit solution to the market. Since it's from intel then you know all of their partners and customers with the cash will roll out itanium systems, you know there's a market for anything from intel, no matter how shitty. Why these people aren't running ultrasparcs is beyond me, it's a mature 64 bit architecture and it really doesn't seem to be any more expensive than itanium.
Anyway right now hammer isn't out, there's no competition, and itanium processor modules are still well up over a grand last I looked. When hammer debuts hopefully around $300-500 for the range -- supposedly hammer will be priced "comparatively" with athlon xp whatever that means -- itanium will wither and die for all but existing contracts, itanium2 will take a serious hit (but how serious?) and intel will probably announce something new on the horizon which will scale beyond hammer but not for a couple years. Sound familiar?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Well... our experience with the O2K was a bit different (haven't touched an O3K though so I dunno much about it). With the Origins 2K and NUMA, if you ran large simulations, the distant memory would flat kill your performance so you had to make sure your working sets fit on a single node. Also, even though each processor board in the O2K had 2 CPUs, if you actually ran an even somewhat memory intensive process on each CPU, your app slogged because the memory bandwidth only supported about 1.4X the bandwidth of a single CPU. Another bad habit was that if someone snuck onto the machine when you were running your 64 process job and they fired up something like emacs, it would cause this nasty shifting around of memory that got you into the NUMA state mentioned above. Later, SGI came out with some tools that would minimize this effect though, which helped a lot.
So... in order to support the kind of stuff we did and run it on 64 nodes, we would have had to buy a 128 processor system because we would only run one process per node and all the nodes were two processors.
So, we also looked at the Sun10K. While the cpu to cpu comparison of raw crunch was lower, the memory bandwidth was uniform so the programs behaved predictably and were almost as fast in any case. It also had the benefit of running 1 process (as far as performance per process) wasn't noticably different from running 64 processes (on a 64 processor machine). At the time, the Sun10K met our needs much better.
Now, of course, all those have been shoved out the door and replaced by something even faster.
Are you saying that slashdot is paid for these stories? Personally, I like to hear about interesting new tech stuff, especially linux-related, even if it IS a commercial product. BUT if these really are paid ads, then yes, they should be flagged.
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
1) It runs 32 bit software quite slowly. 2) It has so many transistors that it's really big, and the cost of chips goes up with size.
so it would hardly be easier to market to end-users than, say, Sun's Sparc chip.
BSD is fine for your dual-CPU mail-server-in-a-closet. That's what was designed for.
However, the world does not end with you. Scientific applications, like weather prediction, etc. need something different (perhaps i should say "something more") than a mail server in a closet. That's what Irix was designed for. That's why some people buy 1024 CPU machines, running Irix. That's why some will buy 64 CPU machines running Linux.
You're not a troll, you're just ignorant.
Sad but true. I watched EMC kill DG/UX after they bought DG, HP are doing the same with Alpha and Tru64 (nee Digital Unix, nee OSF/1), and SGI are ditching IRIX. All of them are continuing maintenance of their old systems while it's still profitable, but DG/UX is dead, and the others are on their last legs :-(
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Windows XP 64-bit Edition is available for the Itanium architecture.
It even has a service pack out.
Moreover, the Itanium can run 32-bit programs. It just isn't very fast at doing so.
hat's off
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
If you look at their developer platform for this machine, you see Fortran, C++, and C listed. No Java.
Just a thought for all the Java folk who got so defensive about my comparisons of their language to others. Java is a useful, powerful tool -- but if you want to develop for top-flight parallel hardware, you don't use Java.
All about me
SGI is a great technology company and like other technology companies they don't know how to market their way out of a paper bag. I really hope they can get the word out and sell enough of these systems and keep the doors open.
Yeah it's cache-coherent; otherwise it couldn't run a single OS image. It uses a similar interconnect as the Origin 3000, which has been described in the literature.
The Register also has a blurb on this. I like the dig at Sun at the end, meow indeed.
I'm not arguing that /. needs the money to run their site. I'm just saying that, in the spirit of open disclosure, they should identify which stories have been paid for.
... what makes /. special?
Like the "This is a paid advertisment" notice you see in newspapers above ads that try and look like articles. There is a reason newspapers have to print that
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
Cache coherence in hardware is not necessary to run a single OS image. Software can synchronize and flush the caches, but of course that's much slower.
But the stock Linux kernel requires hardware cache coherence, so the Altix must have it.