Flexible supercomputing for engineering design on blades reaches a new level

Yet another level of supercomputing has arrived for intensive engineering design and analysis, from SGI. SGI’s Altix 4000 platform, shown publicly for the first time last month, involves a new design made entirely of blades, and customisable for compute, memory and specialised graphics, all on a common infrastructure. First available is the top end Altix 4700, and both size and scale are very impressive, with the ability to go to much larger processors and memory numbers than before – the latter rising from 24Tb to 100Tb, while processor capacity rises to 8,000. John Fleming, high performance computing marketing manager at SGI, says: “We have already taken two very large orders: Leibniz Computing Centre in Munich for a 3,328-processor system to be delivered in 2006, and one for Dresden of 1,600 processors.” He also points to the smaller footprint – down to about one third of the physical space of its predecessors – and the fact that the system will accommodate Intel’s dual core future processors, while pricing is “will clearly be less than the existing range of system.” Asked about SGI’s financial health and the fact of lower cost workstations nudging into its market, he says: “There is some impact at the lower levels. SGI’s results haven’t looked so wonderful in the past but Altix has been growing healthily with Linux-based HPC. “There are dynamics in the market and we’re very focused on providing the highest levels of capability to science and technical applications. Those are much harder to reach fro a clustered approach of smaller systems.”