SGI unveils Altix ICE blade for HPC

BANGALORE, INDIA: SGI, a server and storage solutions provider, today unveiled its Altix ICE 8200, new generation blade server for high-performance computing (HPC), based on Intel Xeon platform.

Unveiling the new blade servers, Ravi Pendekanti, senior director Worldwide Solutions Marketing, SGI, said that according to IDC, HPC is one of the fastest growing markets in the computing space, and SGI aims to deliver performance computing and data management solutions tailored for HPC and high performance business customers.

“Further SGI provides clustering as per the desires of the customers. Management of the cluster is the biggest challenge and SGI address this challenge,” he added. “ICE stands for Integrated Compute Environment. The new blade enables large scale-out environments while minimizing the demands on the data center’s space and power.

It enables to generate greater performance with simpler management. The new generation blade server is more energy efficient, increases reliability and lowers the total cost of ownership,” said Pendekanti. It is based on Linux, powered by as many as 512 Intel Xeon processor cores and delivers six TFLOPS of performance. Its ultra-dense rack architecture delivers up to 40 per cent more compute performance per floor tile than competing blades.

SGI Altix ICE features an energy-smart design that can save organizations up to $53,000 in annual energy costs for a 10TFLOP system. And it arrives pre-integrated for easy “power up and go” deployment, allowing customers to focus on their work – not on set-up and administration. SGI has implemented a new, highly integrated version of the “Atoka” board, which SGI co-designed with Intel Corporation.

This next-generation board, designed specifically for the HPC market, allows a single SGI Altix ICE 8200 blade to be powered by two Dual- or Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors, and up to 32GB of memory. “Intel’s long history of successful collaboration with SGI has led to important HPC breakthroughs in scalable shared memory and compute density,” said William Wu, regional platform marketing manager - Server Platforms Group, Intel Asia Pacific.

“SGI Altix ICE, built around the double-density Atoka board, is the latest of these achievements to deliver HPC solutions that make the most of standards-based, multi-core Intel processor technology.” The new blade server is available in configurations ranging from 8 to 512 processors per rack. A full rack powered by 512 Intel Xeon Processor cores is US list priced from approximately $350,000.