SILICON GRAPHICS PROCESSORS 128 PRESENTED IN ONE UNIT
Silicon Graphics (SGI) is November 11 Origin 3900 supercomputer, contains 128 processors in a single block. The system is equipped with 256 GB of shared memory and can be expanded up to 512 processors with a maximum capacity of 2 GB of memory each, which in general is 1 TB.
According to SGI operating officer Warren Pratt (Warren Pratt), MIPS-processors used in Origin 3900, consume little power (15-20 W vs. 135 watts for Itanium and 85-150 watts for most modern processors), so there was the possibility of more dense placing them in the box. Besides, the waiting time is reduced, a substantial portion of which has a delay due to signal transmission wires.
That is, the opportunity to build not only the smallest but also the fastest computer.
In addition to the hardware design, the company unveiled Wednesday IRGO High Performance Computing (HPC) Workflow Optimization. She is running a 64-bit version of OS Unix SGI IRIX and optimizes the use of system resources and application performance.
Possible initial market the new system can be a resource-intensive scientific computing, called number-crunching. Origin Model 3900 is compatible with the older members of the family of Origin 3000 and uses the architecture of the total shared memory NUMAflex, which is a proprietary company and allows to link together thousands of processors.
SGI is gradually moving towards the support of Linux-based systems. CXFS, distributive version of the high-performance file system sharing SGI XFS, allowing to expand to a volume of several petabytes (1024 terabytes) will be included in the output of approaching the core Linux 2.6. The new system will be unveiled at the conference ACM / IEEE HPC and Networking Conference, to be held from November 19 to 21 in the United States.
Source: based on site Vnunet.com
