PROCESSORS

A year after it first previewed the world's most powerful Linux(R) supercomputer, SGI on Monday will return to SC2003 with the SGI(R) Altix(TM) 3000 family after amassing industry awards and shattering performance records. Available to customers for less than a year, SGI Altix systems already have been adopted by a growing number of bellwether users, from Procter & Gamble and Marathon Oil Company to several U.S. National Laboratories and leading universities. SGI created a sensation at SC2002 by demonstrating the as-yet-unnamed system running 64 Intel(R) Itanium(R) 2 processors in a 64-bit Linux environment and leveraging the SGI(R) NUMAflex(TM) shared-memory architecture. Running a series of demanding HPC applications, SGI revealed the power of the system's balanced architecture and its ability to process massive data sets. SGI shipped the first Altix system two months later. Unlike most clustered-computing schemes that rely on distributed memory (where the memory is specific to each processor), SGI's approach to global shared-memory eliminates data transfer overhead by providing a single memory address space (or single system image), allowing multiple processors and I/O nodes to access all the data in the system's memory directly and efficiently. The comparison of running a data-intensive program on a shared-memory vs. non-shared-memory system would be like the experience of shopping for multiple items at a superstore vs. shopping for those same items at multiple smaller stores that are not physically close together. The superstore experience is much faster, more convenient, and less complicated. "At SC2002, we previewed a new system designed to combine the scalable SGI NUMAflex architecture with Intel's Itanium 2 processors and 64-bit Linux to bring supercomputer-class performance to open-systems environments. This new system was designed to help solve demanding technical problems at a price/performance advantage that simply isn't possible with proprietary technology," said Dave Parry, senior vice president and general manager, Server and Platform Group, SGI. "This year, Altix returns with more than 60 optimized HPC applications, a growing list of performance records and industry awards, unparalleled scalability achievements, and an ever-broadening installed base. And as we approach the Altix system's first anniversary, we look forward to even more exciting advancements in this groundbreaking product line." "The SGI Altix system provides a well balanced architecture for many important scientific applications," said Dr. Jack Dongarra, director of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville's Innovative Computing Laboratory and Center for Information Technology Research. "The Altix architecture provides a program model which is easy to use and allows for rapid implementation and straight-forward debugging. In many applications the Itanium 2 process provides for relatively high performance with a modest number of processors, leading to uncomplicated scalability."