I’ve got to admit, I’m impressed by SGI. I really thought the UV system was going to be the albatross that drug SGI to Davy Jones’ locker, but they’re actually doing ok. A press-release out today announces 500 Altix UV systems delivered. Now, most companies wouldn’t even bother announcing 500 systems (Dell probably ships 500 systems in a day or less), but these are significantly bigger and more expensive that your average computer.
As the world’s most scalable x86 platform, customers can deploy standard Windows Server® 2008 R2 and Windows-based applications to the maximum scale possible of 256 physical cores and 2 terabytes of memory. Altix UV 1000 with 256 cores of Intel® Xeon® processor 7500 series and 2 TB of memory has four times the x86 scalability of HP and 2.6 times the scalability of IBM.
Their partnership with Microsoft for Windows HPC Server is probably a big reason they’ve done as well as they have, as Windows HPC Server really seems to be taking off in Financial HPC. I’m not aware of anyone doing petascale work with UV’s, but maybe they’re on to something in the high-but-not-extreme end of HPC.
Of course, their financials still seem a little fishy to me. We’ll see how they look at the end of the year.
via SGI Marks Supercomputing Milestone with over 500 Altix UV Systems Delivered | Business Wire.
They release the UV in November 2009, so that’s about 300 per year. Glad to see SGi rebound since my company pioneered the SGi aftermarket for refurbished systems and maintenance starting in 1990. Looks like at least a few more years of SGi business ; )