SGI this week is pushing a fresh batch of hardware into its Altix ICE blade server lineup. The company announced two new blade enclosures and new blade options.

The new enclosures for SGI's Altix ICE 8200 platform now support Intel's 5400 'Seaburg' Chipset with dual- and quad-core Xeon processors. SGI rather generously dubbed its two additions as the "performance" option and "price/performance" option.

The "performance" system features a dual pane Infiniband network with dual-rail compatible capable MPI libraries. Customers can choose to configure the IB network as either a hypercube for systems with a larger node counts, or a non-blocking fat tree topology.

The price/performance option uses a single InfiniBand network pane, along with the choice of hypercube or fat tree network topology.

Both versions include a separate Gigabit Ethernet network.

Altix ICE blades now include SGI ProPack for Linux, which gives granular control over throughput and I/O performance. The blades also include an updated version of SGI's Tempo cluster management tool. Tempo lets admins restrict traffic within the rack or within the blades themselves to keep extraneous traffic off the network. ®

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