VizWorld.com

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.

Hardware hpc, sgi, ultraviolet, uv

The not-so-secret HPC that’s going to bring SGI back to superiority as the premium SSI HPC provider has finally been announced: Ultraviolet.

UV features the fifth generation of the NUMAlink interconnect, offering a 15 GB/sec transfer rate, MPI offload capability in the UV hub chip, and direct access up to 16 TB of shared memory. The system can be configured with up to 2048 Nehalem-EX cores shipping Q2 next year from Intel in a single system image, and as with the 4700 multiple SSIs can be federated together while preserving the single global address space. When I was being briefed on the launch before the show, Jill Matzke, Altix product manager, reminded me that SGI has been very active in the Linux community: all the IP needed to make this shared-memory goodness work has been contributed back to the SUSE and Red Hat communities, so you can actually load a stock distro on your UV when it shows up, and everything will work.

Price and availability are still a bit fuzzy, as SGI is waiting for Intel to announce the new Nehalem chips that it uses, but it’s great to see SGI rising back to HPC powerhouse status.  I’ll be meeting with SGI tomorrow afternoon and hope to get more details then.

via SGI finally announces make-or-break HPC platform | insideHPC.com.

Hardware hpc, sc09, sgi, ultraviolet