SGI ships high-performance blades

SGI has unveiled a new line of blade servers

SGI (formerly Silicon Graphics) has unveiled a line of blade servers aimed at high performance computing (HPC) applications. The product is designed to scale up to meet user needs, but is also engineered to be power efficient and can save firms thousands on energy bills, the company said.

Altix ICE is based on a dense rack architecture running dual or quad-core Intel Xeon chips, so that a single ICE 8200 rack can have as many as 512 processor cores and deliver 6 teraflops of performance, according to SGI.

"We tried to move along another notch in density, allowing you to fit in more compute power for a given floor space," said SGI European marketing director John Masters.

Applications for the system include engineering and pharmaceutical simulations, fluid dynamics and computational physics.

The blades are based on boards co-designed with Intel that accommodate up to 32GB of memory. Both blades and racks are interconnected via InfiniBand backplanes, enabling users to scale up simply by adding another rack, Masters said. This also enhances reliability by doing away with cables.

Despite its rack density, Altix ICE is highly power-efficient thanks to features borrowed from SGI's SMP and Itanium blades, the company said. Each ICE system also has a water-cooled door design that carries away up to 95 percent of the heat generated by the blades, which can save on the cost of cooling the entire datacentre.

SGI ships Altix ICE with Suse Linux Enterprise Server and storage management tools pre-installed. A full rack with 512 processors costs $350,000.