GOVERNMENT
SGI Altix ICE momentum thunders on with powerful new blade enclosures & options
SGI Altix ICE is the industry's first blade system to support the latest Intel 5400 Chipset (codenamed "Seaburg") with Dual- and Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processors. The newly available blade options increase the performance density of the Altix ICE platform by including improvements to memory, bandwidth and interconnect performance, and an enhanced cluster management environment. The new enclosures also make use of high-performance, next-generation InfiniBand processor technology. "Today's announcement shows that SGI Altix ICE is rapidly maturing as a platform for HPC," said Bill Mannel, senior director, SGI server marketing. "These latest enhancements to Altix ICE allow organizations to deploy solutions that are flexible enough to adapt to their workflows and budgets while maximizing performance and productivity. And with the Altix ICE platform enabling even large-scale systems to get up and running quickly, SGI can deliver those advantages faster so customers can realize a return on their investments sooner." More Flexibility with New SGI Altix ICE Blade Enclosures
To the existing SGI Altix ICE 8200 platform, SGI is adding two new blade enclosures. The new options give customers the flexibility to optimize for the greatest bandwidth performance or, for more budget-conscious, an enclosure configured for optimal price/performance.
- Performance Option. This new option features dual-plane InfiniBand networks for reduced network traffic congestion and improved bandwidth. MPIs (message passing interfaces) with dual-rail capability will take advantage of the architectural design by enabling faster and more efficient transfer of large and small messages. Customers can choose between Hypercube (which is best for larger node count MPI jobs) or non-blocking Fat Tree network topology (suited for smaller node count MPI jobs).
- Price/Performance Option. Balancing bandwidth with budgetary constraints, this new option utilizes a single-plane InfiniBand network, along with the choice of a Hypercube or Fat Tree network topology.
Both options include a separate Gigabit Ethernet network for administrative communications, further maximizing the amount of bandwidth available to data and I/O traffic. The new blade enclosures also take advantage of the SGI Altix ICE platform's cool-running, energy-smart design. In fact, eight Altix ICE installations rank among the top 10 percent of the world's 500 most energy-efficient supercomputers, according to the February Green 500 list. Greater Control, Flexibility and Reliability with Enhanced Environment In addition, SGI Altix ICE blades can now take advantage of powerful networking features available through SGI ProPack for Linux Operating System. Altix ICE customers can use ProPack to exert granular control over throughput and I/O performance. For instance, depending on the needs of a specific application or workflow, users can aggregate a system's InfiniBand bandwidth or separate I/O traffic from data traffic. SGI also has enhanced the SGI Tempo cluster management tool. Through an innovative Hierarchical Management Framework, Tempo allows IT administrators to manage a nested series of networks that can utilize large deployments in a highly distributed fashion. Restricting traffic within the rack, or even within the blades themselves, keeps extraneous traffic off the network. With Tempo's diskless boot function, customers also can simultaneously boot all blades, enabling one or multiple racks to boot in less than five minutes. Individual nodes can also independently be powered up and down within a cluster, enabling administrators to save on energy costs by powering down nodes that aren't in use. Tempo supports environments serving tens to hundreds of users and thousands of nodes and incorporating multiple applications and operating systems. Through it all, administrators can manage the entire environment as a single system. Beginning this summer, SGI Altix ICE systems will provide new levels of reliability by incorporating failover capabilities via the next release of SGI ProPack. With this new feature, applications supported by the SGI Message Passing Toolkit (MPI) will remain operable even as cables within an Altix ICE enclosure are pulled. SGI Tempo will also introduce features supporting higher availability, including the ability to hot swap and automatically reprovision Altix ICE blades, the ability to create cold spares for admin nodes, and more options for compute node root file system configurations to improve recovery times. Growing Number of High-Profile Deployments Since launching the Altix ICE platform last year, SGI has been deploying systems in some of the world's most demanding environments. Among them:
- The State of New Mexico's Encanto, a 14,336-core SGI Altix ICE system with 28 Terabytes (TB) of memory and ranked as the third most powerful supercomputer in the world, was up and running 48 hours after it arrived at the Intel Corporation facility in Rio Rancho, N.M.
- SGI is deploying a 25,000-core supercomputing system at two sites for the North German Alliance for the Advancement of High-Performance Computing (HLRN). The computing complex, which will incorporate SGI Altix ICE blades, will increase HLRN's current HPC resource by 60 times.
- The Honda Racing F1 Team, based in Brackley, UK, purchased an SGI Altix ICE system to drive computational fluid dynamics applications enabling aerodynamics studies in preparation for the 2008 Formula One season.
"With Altix ICE, the number of complete vehicle CFD models we'll be able to process could increase by a factor of five, which is key in adding performance to the car," said Henrik Diamant, head of CFD, Honda Racing F1 Team. "If we can increase our weekly throughput of parts analyzed, then we can find those fractions of a second that could ultimately give us an edge against the competition." All Altix ICE blade enclosure options are available today. For more information on SGI Altix ICE, visit: its Web site.