SGI Octane III: Supercomputing Gets Personal

SGI Octane III takes high performance computing out of the data center and puts it at the deskside. It combines the immense power and performance capabilities of a high-performance cluster with the portability and usability of a workstation to enable a new era of personal innovation in strategic science, research, development and visualization.

In contrast with standard 2P workstations with only eight cores and moderate memory capacity, Octane III's superior design permits up to 80 high-performance cores and nearly 1TB of memory. Octane III significantly accelerates time-to-results for over 50 HPC applications and supports the latest Intel® processors to capitalize on greater levels of performance, flexibility and scalability. Pre-configured with system software, cluster set up is a breeze.

Plug It In and It Works
Octane III is office ready with a pedestal, one foot by two foot form factor, whisper quiet operation, ease of use features, low maintenance requirements and support for standard office power outlets. A single, conveniently placed button turns it on and off. Octane III enjoys the same cost saving power efficiencies inherent in all SGI Eco-Logical™ compute designs.


Easily Configurable for Deskside HPC
Octane III is optimized for your specific, high performance computing requirements and ships as a factory-tested, pre-integrated platform with broad HPC application support and arrives ready for immediate integration for a smooth out-of-the-box experience.

Octane III allows a wide variety of single and dual-socket node choices and a wide selection of performance, storage, integrated networking, and graphics and compute GPU options. The system is available as an up to ten node deskside cluster configuration or dual-node graphics workstation configurations.

Supported operating systems include:
Microsoft® Windows® HPC Server 2008, SUSE Linux® Enterprise Server, or Red Hat® Enterprise Linux. All Linux-based configurations are available with pre-loaded SGI® ProPack™ system software, SGI® Isle™ Cluster Manager and Altair PBS Professional ™ scheduler to get you up and running quickly.

A High-Performance Graphics Lineage Capitalize on advanced graphics capabilities, brought to you by the same company that invented advanced graphics capabilities. Conceived, designed and built by SGI on the shoulders of its ground-breaking workstations from the past, Octane III is available as a single-node dual-socket graphics workstation with support for the fastest NVIDIA® graphics and compute GPU cards.Octane III is optimized for use with multiple display solutions for expanded advanced visual computing scenarios.

(To access detailed product info please visit manufacturers product pages)

The winner is Jaguar!

The 34th TOP500 List released November 17th in Portland, Oregon at the SC09 Conference.

A PDF version of the TOP500 Report distributed during SC09 can be found here.

In its third run to knock the IBM supercomputer nicknamed “Roadrunner” off the top perch on the TOP500 list of supercomputers, the Cray XT5 supercomputer known as Jaguar finally claimed the top spot on the 34th edition of the closely watched list.

Jaguar, which is located at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility and was upgraded earlier this year, posted a 1.75 petaflop/s performance speed running the Linpack benchmark. Jaguar roared ahead with new processors bringing the theoretical peak capability to 2.3 petaflop/s and nearly a quarter of a million cores. One petaflop/s refers to one quadrillion calculations per second.

Kraken, another upgraded Cray XT5 system at the National Institute for Computational Sciences/University of Tennessee, claimed the No. 3 position with a performance of 832 teraflop/s (trillions of calculations per second).

At No. 4 is the most powerful system outside the U.S. -- an IBM BlueGene/P supercomputer located at the Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ) in Germany. It achieved 825.5 teraflop/s on the Linpack benchmark and was No. 3 in June 2009.

Rounding out the top 5 positions is the new Tianhe-1 (meaning River in Sky) system installed at the National Super Computer Center in Tianjin, China and to be used to address research problems in petroleum exploration and the simulation of large aircraft designs. The highest ranked Chinese system ever, Tianhe-1 is a hybrid design with Intel Xeon processors and AMD GPUs used as accelerators. Each node consists of two AMD GPUs attached to two Intel Xeon processors.