INDUSTRY

With 10,000 Processor Cores, Silicon Graphics Molecule 'Concept Computer' Uses Half the Power and Just 1.4 Percent of the Space of Comparable PC Cluster: Silicon Graphics (SGI) has offered a glimpse of the potential future of dense, power-efficient computing with the Silicon Graphics Molecule concept computer. Like a futuristic concept car points to potential innovations in transportation, Silicon Graphics Molecule is a concept computer that illustrates how the latest low-watt, multi-core consumer electronics technology, such as the Intel Atom processor, can be combined with breakthrough Silicon Graphics Kelvin cooling technology to pack more than 10,000 cores into a single rack. Engineers at Silicon Graphics research labs developed the system to show how consumer electronics technologies and emerging marketplace trends might someday be applied to overcome the limits of today's high-throughput clusters. The Silicon Graphics Molecule concept computer balances processor speed, sustained memory bandwidth, and power consumption. The system has been shown to deliver sustained results on scientific and business problems from seismic processing to rendering and distributed searching. Features of the Silicon Graphics Molecule concept computer include: -- High concurrency with 20,000 threads of execution -- 40 times more than a single rack x86 cluster system -- High throughput with 15TB/sec of memory bandwidth per rack -- over 20 times faster than a single rack x86 cluster system -- Greater balance with up to three times the memory bandwidth/OPS compared to current x86 CPUs -- High performance with approximately 3.5 times the computational performance per rack -- Greener with low-watt consumer CPUs and low-power memory that deliver 7 times better memory bandwidth/watt -- Innovative Silicon Graphics Kelvin cooling technology, which enables denser packaging by stabilizing thermal operations in densely configured solutions -- Operating environment flexibility, capable of running industry-standard Linux implementations, with Microsoft Windows variants on some configurations If someday brought to market, a single-rack system based on the Silicon Graphics Molecule concept computer would offer the computing power and memory bandwidth of more than 750 high-end PCs, yet it would consume less than half the power and less than 1.4 percent of the physical space. "Analysis of applications and market trends shows that several customer environments can potentially benefit from the combination of significantly higher density, memory bandwidth, memory bandwidth per instruction, and performance per watt," said Shahin Khan, vice president of marketing and strategy at Silicon Graphics. "The Silicon Graphics Molecule concept computer shines a light on what is possible in the future. It explores what a solution to these problems might look like if we utilize an entirely different technology base, and how such a system would complement our existing Intel based global shared memory systems and high-performance massively parallel clusters, which rank among the most powerful systems in the world." "By combining advances in several distinct areas of components, packaging, interconnect and cooling, this concept computer illustrates a new balance can be achieved for high density computing appliances, enabling the deployment of massive compute power in challenging environmental conditions," said Michael Woodacre, Chief Engineer at Silicon Graphics research labs.