ENGINEERING

Silicon Graphics today announced that its SGI Altix 350 server has demonstrated record breaking price/performance in recent benchmark tests, revealing the Altix 350 system's ability to outperform competing systems from a host of vendors. The tests were independently conducted by Multipath Corporation, developers of FMS, a library that improves performance and problem solving capabilities of scientific and engineering applications. The SGI Altix system's FMS performance eclipsed that of all other similarly configured systems running the same test, and achieved new heights in price/performance, an increasingly important advantage to customers striving to make the most of their technology budgets. "These FMS benchmark results show that Altix 350 has the ability to efficiently drive numerically intensive applications, such as those that help organizations reduce design risks by simulating product performance digitally, before costly production decisions are made," said Dr. Ronald Young, president of Multipath Corporation. "With a mid-range system like Altix 350, engineering and scientific organizations can accomplish more work in less time, which allows for more accurate and useful results on the back end." Running 100,000 equations in an FMS test of full complex nonsymmetric matrices, a 16-processor SGI Altix 350 system averaged 68,371 MFLOPS (million floating-point operations per second) for 11 hours, a result that easily outpaces most high-performance UNIX servers in use today. Complete Altix 350 results are available from the Multipath Web site at http://www.fmslib.com/mkt/bench_altix_16p.html . Results for all tested systems are also available at http://www.fmslib.com/mkt/platforms.html . The SGI Altix 350 system, which incorporates Intel Itanium 2 processors and a 64-bit standard Linux environment, provides leading price/performance and scalability for departmental and mid-range computing deployments and is an excellent building block for large-node cluster configurations using industry-standard interconnects. "About every decade, computer systems undergo a major paradigm shift that dramatically increases speeds and cost-efficiencies," added Young. "Just as we witnessed the move from CISC to RISC processors in the early 1990s, today we're seeing a new generation of systems that leverage industry-standard processors capable of supporting multiple floating-point operations per clock cycle, even as clock speeds continue to increase. The SGI Altix 350 system, which integrates those components with SGI's unique server architecture, admirably represents this new era of computing technology. In fact, we've already observed that the Altix 350 system's price/MFLOP is one-tenth that of previous generations of UNIX servers." The Altix family leverages the built-in SGI NUMAlink interconnect fabric, which allows global addressing of all memory in the system and delivers data up to 200 times faster than conventional interconnects. For the first time, more complex data sets and complete workflows can be driven entirely out of memory, enabling productivity breakthroughs that traditional Linux clusters or repurposed UNIX servers can't achieve. The Altix 350 server offers breakthrough flexibility and configurability for mid-range configurations, scaling up to 16 processors and 192GB memory per node. It is uniquely capable of independently scaling processors, shared memory and/or I/O on a single, standard chassis with different expansion modules, providing optimal resource usage for demanding technical applications. FMS (Fast Matrix Solver) has been the industry standard since 1981 for production applications involving large matrices. FMS efficiently stores the problem data on disk, allowing the solution of extremely large problems with minimum physical memory. FMS is used to enhance a broad range of applications -- from aerospace engineering to acoustical and electromagnetic analysis -- by allowing users to increase their problem size. By conducting more calculations in a given time period, engineers can hone their results faster. For instance, such capabilities have proven valuable in antenna design for use in defense and homeland security applications, which are both time- and budget-sensitive. Availability SGI Altix 350 systems are available today in configurations of four to 16 processors per system, with clustered configurations scaling to thousands of processors. Additional Altix 350 system technical and availability information is posted on www.sgi.com/products/servers/altix/ .