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January 8, 2003 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Supercomputer developer Silicon Graphics (SGI.com) announced on Tuesday that it has introduced its Altix 3000 family of servers and superclusters, designed to allow the Linux operating system to handle enormous computing tasks.
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The Altix family, says SGI, combines the company’s supercomputer architecture with Intel Itanium 2 processors and the Linux operating system, setting records for scalability and performance.
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Each node in the Altix 3000 series runs a single Linux operating system image with up to 64 Itanium 2 processors and 512 GB of memory. Using the SGI NUMAlink system interconnect fabric on several nodes, the machines transmit data up to 200 times faster than with conventional clustering techniques.
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According to SGI, Altix 3000 superclusters work like supercomputers by providing global shared memory across nodes and operating systems. And the incorporation of Linux creates a standadards-based platform for the opportunities offered by the systems.
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The Altix 3000 family will be made available this quarter, in both entry-level and scalable supercluster models. The entry-level server starts at $70,176 for four processors with up to 32 GB of memory and scales to 12 processors and 96 GB of memory. The supercluster model scales to hundreds of processors and more than 1 TB of memory now, with future scalability to 2,048 processors and 16 TB of global shared memory. The 64-processor system begins at $1,129,262.
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SGI’s use of the Linux operating system may allow the company to offer substantially lower price points than its competition in the supercomputing space. The company says the Altix 3000 family offers roughly twice the performance of comparable IBM machines for half the price.
