Thursday, August 05, 2004
Triangle Linux Users' Group meeting about SGI Systems
Since I have fallen behind quite a bit on logging the users' group meetings I have attended recently, it is now time to catch up a bit. I attended the July Triangle Linux Users' Group meeting, at which John Gorski, a Systems Engineer from SGI gave a presentation outlining his company's current hardware offerings and the role that Linux is playing on his company's products. The main points that I got out of his presentation are as follows:
- SGI has realigned itself to focus on the area of high performance computing, data management and advanced visualization. The five markets that they are now targeting are defense, energy, science, manufacturing and media.
- SGI's main legacy product was a line of machines using MIPS processors running on a proprietary UNIX called IRIX. They are now moving to a product line called Altix, which runs on Itanium 2 processors using Linux.
- In the field of High Performance Computing, SGI boasts many firsts, including a Linux system running with 512 processors in a single OS image.
- SGI chose the Intel Itanium 2 over the competing 64 bit AMD Opteron processor since its architecture derives its performance through frequency as opposed to the Opteron, which derives its performance through parallelism.
- The Altix server family consists of three lines, the 3700, which is a supercomputer, the 3300, which is en entry level machine, and the 350, which is designed as a departmental/workgroup server.
- The shared memory architecture of the Altix was discussed, in which memory appears as one global shared memory space.
- The roadmap for scaling the architecture was presented. It started in 2003 with 64 processors. In mid 2004 512 processors were achieved. The goal for mid 2005 is to scale the architecture to 16384 processors.
- SGI is moving towards a highly modular architecture, called the NUMAflex architecture. It contains the following modules:
C-Brick - CPU and memory
R-Rick - Router
I-Brick - I/O module
D-Brick - Disk expansion
X-Brick - XIO-expansion
G-Brick - Graphics expansion
M-Brick - Memory expansion
This provides an 'expansion on demand' growth path. One size does not fit all. This provides a flexible scalability for systems to match problem requirements.
- The Altix 350 starts at $12,195. It can be clustered to 1000s of processors. The drives and power supply are hot swappable, but Linux does not support this yet.
- A point was made that High Performance is NOT synonymous with High Uptime.
- The Altix 350 is a very suitable as a departmental server, a database server (supports most databases) and throughput cluster.
- SGI bought Cray in 1996 and later sold it to Terra for cheap.
- The Linux OS options available for SGI hardware were discussed. There is an SGI Advanced Linux environment, which currently supports Red Hat Advanced Server, and soon will support SuSe Linux Enterprise Server. SGI Open Source Enhancements are run on top of this, and the "SGI Pro Pack" is run on top of that.
- Next, data management was discussed. Problems of data management are becoming increasingly more complex. SGI storage technologies and SAN solutions were discussed, using the SGI SAN 2000 as an example.
- Lifecycle management was also briefly discussed.
Comments []
- SGI has realigned itself to focus on the area of high performance computing, data management and advanced visualization. The five markets that they are now targeting are defense, energy, science, manufacturing and media.
- SGI's main legacy product was a line of machines using MIPS processors running on a proprietary UNIX called IRIX. They are now moving to a product line called Altix, which runs on Itanium 2 processors using Linux.
- In the field of High Performance Computing, SGI boasts many firsts, including a Linux system running with 512 processors in a single OS image.
- SGI chose the Intel Itanium 2 over the competing 64 bit AMD Opteron processor since its architecture derives its performance through frequency as opposed to the Opteron, which derives its performance through parallelism.
- The Altix server family consists of three lines, the 3700, which is a supercomputer, the 3300, which is en entry level machine, and the 350, which is designed as a departmental/workgroup server.
- The shared memory architecture of the Altix was discussed, in which memory appears as one global shared memory space.
- The roadmap for scaling the architecture was presented. It started in 2003 with 64 processors. In mid 2004 512 processors were achieved. The goal for mid 2005 is to scale the architecture to 16384 processors.
- SGI is moving towards a highly modular architecture, called the NUMAflex architecture. It contains the following modules:
C-Brick - CPU and memory
R-Rick - Router
I-Brick - I/O module
D-Brick - Disk expansion
X-Brick - XIO-expansion
G-Brick - Graphics expansion
M-Brick - Memory expansion
This provides an 'expansion on demand' growth path. One size does not fit all. This provides a flexible scalability for systems to match problem requirements.
- The Altix 350 starts at $12,195. It can be clustered to 1000s of processors. The drives and power supply are hot swappable, but Linux does not support this yet.
- A point was made that High Performance is NOT synonymous with High Uptime.
- The Altix 350 is a very suitable as a departmental server, a database server (supports most databases) and throughput cluster.
- SGI bought Cray in 1996 and later sold it to Terra for cheap.
- The Linux OS options available for SGI hardware were discussed. There is an SGI Advanced Linux environment, which currently supports Red Hat Advanced Server, and soon will support SuSe Linux Enterprise Server. SGI Open Source Enhancements are run on top of this, and the "SGI Pro Pack" is run on top of that.
- Next, data management was discussed. Problems of data management are becoming increasingly more complex. SGI storage technologies and SAN solutions were discussed, using the SGI SAN 2000 as an example.
- Lifecycle management was also briefly discussed.
Comments []
