SGI Announces Next-Generation Altix ICE Scale-Out Supercomputer

SGI, a global leader in HPC and datacenter solutions, today announced the immediate availability of Altix ICE 8400, the next generation of the award-winning Altix ICE scale-out high performance computing (HPC) blade platform. SGI also announced today it has submitted world record breaking SPEC benchmark performance results with Altix ICE 8400, demonstrating its readiness to implement multi-petascale supercomputers.

Altix ICE 8400 contains significant enhancements over prior Altix ICE generations, including through and through Quad Data Rate InfiniBand interconnect. SGI's elegantly-designed integrated backplane sports up to three times the link-to-node bandwidth relative to competitive QDR InfiniBand clusters to maximize performance where most job traffic occurs. Altix ICE 8400 supports up to 128 processors (1,536 cores) per cabinet with support for 130W CPU sockets. Three on-board Mellanox ConnectX-2 InfiniBand HCA compute blade configurations are also supported, and include single-port, dual-port or two single-port chipsets.

Altix ICE 8400, with its innovative blade design, easily and affordably scales to up to 65,536 compute nodes with integrated single or dual plane InfiniBand backplane interconnect. Open x86 architecture makes it equally simple to deploy commercial, open source or custom applications on completely unmodified Novell SUSE or Red Hat Linux operating systems.

Altix ICE 8400 easily meets the needs of the world's largest supercomputing deployments. Recognized for its design win at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at Ames Research Center, SGI helps Pleiades Supercomputer, the world's largest InfiniBand cluster, scale with an additional 32 cabinets of Altix ICE 8400 to nearly a petaflop. The system fully leverages SGI's hypercube topology to enable seamless cabinet-level upgrades without any production downtime, saving millions of core hours in the process.

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