SGI Unveils Octane™ III Personal Supercomputer

SGI is pulling back the curtain on their latest hardware offering, the “Octane III”, taking them back to some of the names of yesteryear.

“Octane III makes supercomputing personal again,” said Mark J. Barrenechea, president and CEO of SGI. “Our customers have been asking for office environment products with large core counts that are easy to use and whisper-quiet. Octane III brings all of this to the HPC professional, and enables a new era of personal innovation in strategic science, research, development and visualization.”

It currently comes in three configurations, available on their website.

• OC3-19DV1 Intel 1-way – 19 Dual-Core Single Socket systems, for 38 cores on 19 nodes, 76GB Ram max.
• OC3-10TY12  Intel 2-Way – Ten dual-socket quad-core Xeons, 80 cores on 10 nodes, 960GB Memory total.
• OC3-TY11 “Graphics Workstation” - A single dual-socket Quad-Core xeon board with 144GB Ram, but 7 PCI-Express slots (2 x16, 4 x8, and a x4).

The 10TY12 looks pretty nice to pack into a desktop system, but the rest are fairly underwhelming. Even the “Graphics Workstation” seems rather unimpressive by modern standards with 8 cores & 2 PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots that could come with pretty much any modern PC.  Am I missing something?

Update: One interesting tidbit pointed out by an observant reader is that the press release indicates that you have the Xeon 3400 (Lynnfield) Processor as an option, however it’s nowhere to be found on the SGI builds or the PDF Datasheet they provide.  I’m attempting to reach someone inside SGI for details on this.

Update #2: Over at InsideHPC, John West has more details about the system, such as:

• The 960GB of Memory is not shared (“it’s not a baby ultraviolet”), it’s 96G visible by each node, requiring you to have parallelized applications to use it.
• In the graphics configuration, it’s a classic vertically mounted motherboard so you get the 1 motherboard in the system, further adding to the “huh?” factor.
• He states that the Xeon 3400 configuration is for 40 cores per machine.

Update #3: Just heard back from SGI.  The Xeon 3400 option isn’t actually available yet.  It’s planned to be an option in the future, but currently your only options are the existing quad-core Xeon 5500′s or Atom’s.

via SGI Unveils Octane™ III Personal Supercomputer.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .