PROCESSORS

In another sign of growing support from the Linux community, SGI today announced its SGI® Altix(TM) 3000 family of servers and superclusters has been named "Favorite Server" in Linux Journal's annual Readers' Choice Awards. More than 7,500 Linux users and developers cast votes for products in 28 categories, with SGI Altix emerging as the top choice among all Linux® OS-based servers. The latest award reflects continued success for the acclaimed Altix(TM) system, which in July was named Product of the Year by the editors of Linux Journal and in January earned "Best of Show" at Linux World Conference & Expo 2003. The fastest system ever to run the Linux operating system, SGI Altix is a true 64-bit high-performance computing (HPC) platform that leverages the advantages of open source computing with up to 64 powerful Intel® Itanium® 2 processors in a single node -- and up to 512 in a supercluster configuration with global shared memory. "Among the many accolades Altix has earned since its introduction in January, those that come from the Linux community hold a special significance," said Dave Parry, senior vice president and general manager, Server at Platform Group, SGI. "Linux has emerged as a true option for production HPC environments due in large part to the support Altix has received from users and developers who continue to drive the evolution of open source solutions. Working closely with this community, we are redefining the limits of performance and scalability on Linux." The SGI Altix family of servers combines industry-standard 64-bit Linux with the Intel Itanium 2 processor family and SGI® NUMAflex(TM) architecture to enable global shared memory systems from a few to hundreds of processors with up to 4 terabytes of shared memory, which is a first for Linux OS-based computing. Powered by the third-generation NUMAflex supercomputing architecture, even the largest data sets can be handled and analyzed with ease and in record time for production workflows with the most demanding stability. Only the SGI Altix 3000 family of servers is designed around this scalable shared-memory architecture that analyzes data sets as whole entities, without breaking them up into smaller segments to be handled by individual processors. The Altix architecture has proven ideal both for complex shared-memory applications running on a large single system image, and for communication-intensive applications optimized for clustering in throughput workflows.