SGI releases the beast

Nov 14, 2005: Silicon Graphics (SIG) has pulled back the cover on a complete redesign of its flagship Altix line with the new SGI Altix 4000. Taking a different approach with its hardware this time around, SGI has designed the Altix 4000 to be capable of tailoring hardware to application needs rather than being a static powerhouse.

SGI has achieved this by integrating its scalable shared-memory SGI NUMAflex architecture with blade packaging to provide a platform with total flexibility. As a result, the Altix 4000 is the first 64-bit Linux server with a blade design that offers true "plug and solve" flexibility.

It can be configured to any combination of blades. Including multiple types of both standard and configurable compute as well as, memory, I/O and graphics as their needs change. SGI claim that the it is a flexible, scalable and space efficient solution that delivers price relative performance easily eclipsing high-end servers from IBM, HP, Cray and Sun.

"With Altix 4000, SGI continues to drive its high-end computing leadership into new, efficient form factors that will accelerate productivity and reduce time-to-discovery for more customers in more markets," said Bill Trestrail, SGI's Regional Managing Director for South Asia Pacific. "While it's exciting enough to see what these new blade systems are capable of addressing in today's most demanding work, the Altix 4000 makes SGI's vision for multi-paradigm computing real."

A key component of this is SGI's Reconfigurable Application-Specific Computing (RASC) technology. SGI say this enables users to achieve unmatched performance, scalability and bandwidth for data-intensive applications critical to oil and gas exploration, defence and intelligence, bioinformatics, medical imaging, broadcast media, and other data-dependent industries.

Space savings were also important when designing the new Altix. The 4000 blades can be deployed in a small-footprint rack, with up to 40 blades in a compact 2-foot by 3.5-foot rack. This translates to 160 Itanium cores, or nearly 1 Teraflop of computing power in eight square feet.

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