Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2009/09/22/sgi_octaneiii_baby_super/
SGI births smaller baby super
Resurrecting the ghost of Octane
Posted in Channel, 22nd September 2009 03:02 GMT
Silicon Graphics, like Sun Microsystems, got its start as a supplier of technical workstations for nerds, and the new SGI - a combination of the old, bankrupt SGI and the niche server maker Rackable Systems - wants to do what Sun hasn't: get back into the workstation game in a serious way.
Today, such a machine is not called a workstation, but rather a personal supercomputer. The idea behind both boxes is fundamentally the same, despite 25 years of history: get a powerful machine in the hands of a single user with a budget they can afford and without requiring the approval of an IT department.
In August, shortly after closing the acquisition of SGI's assets and putting the SGI name on the combined company, SGI rolled out its combined product roadmap and then rejiggered Rackable's CloudRack cookie sheet servers with a CloudRack X2 variant that was shrunken version of the CloudRack machines, which came in half-rack and full-rack variants. The CloudRackX2, says Geoffrey Noer, senior director of product marketing at the new SGI, was aimed at departments that needed a workgroup cluster. The CloudRack X2s, which launched in early August, offered up to 216 X64 cores with some two switches and three power supplies in a 14U rack on wheels. This is not exactly perceived as a workstation, and its price was surely well above the discretionary budget level. If the CloudRack X2 was to bridge the gap between a two-socket, dual video card PC-style workstation and a rack of clustered servers, it was a bridge too far. The real bridge, it turns out, is the Octane III machine announced today by SGI.
The Octane III is being billed as the personal supercomputer, and it comes to market 16 years after SGI's popular MIPS/Irix Indigo workstations rolled out; the original two-socket Octanes and their funky tower cases came out in 1996, and were beefed up with the Octane2 in 2000. The interesting thing about the Octanes was that they had a crossbar switch architecture, called Crossbow, instead of a system bus, a kind of point-to-point interconnect that was more widely commercialized by Advanced Micro Devices as HyperTransport. It is ironic, in that sad IT definition of irony, that SGI had the right ideas so long ago, ideas that Intel is only getting to market with the QuickPath Interconnect architecture of its Nehalem family of chips this year. The Octanes ran both Irix and Linux.
The Octane III chassis is 12.5 inches wide, 27.5 inches high, and 26.1 inches deep. The system has been designed to be quiet enough to use in an office environment, although it is hard to imagine how this can be the case in an 80-core system. But, that's what Noer said it was, so if you get one and it is loud, you know who to send the complaints to.
You can get the Octane III personal supercomputer in three different configurations, and the first is not substantially different from a two-socket workstation you might build yourself or buy from Hewlett-Packard or Dell. The OC3-TY11 is set up as a high-end graphics workstation that can has a motherboard mounted vertically in the chassis that supports two of Intel's quad-core Xeon 5500 "Nehalem EP" processors.
This machine has 18 DDR3 memory slots, for a maximum of 144 GB of main memory. The board has twin Gigabit Ethernet NICs and fast PCI-Express x16 slots for sporting two graphics cards from nVidia (the Quadro FX1800, FX3800, FX4800, and FX5800 are all supported) or up to two Tesla C1060 graphics co-processors. (You can do one of each, of course, but picking two Tesla co-processors restricts you to the crap on-board graphics on the mobo).
For this workstation to be interesting, you really want more than two x16 slots. Anyway, the graphics workstation configuration of the Octane III can have four 3.5-inch SATA disks. Pricing was not available because the new SGI has inherited some bad habits from Rackable about not having list prices for its products.
The personal supercomputer configuration that is probably going to be most appealing to HPC customers is the OC3-10TY12, which puts CloudRack cookie sheet trays with ten two-socket Xeon 5500 servers plus a Gigabit Ethernet or InfiniBand switch (either dual or quad data rate speeds) into the chassis. Because of the power and cooling issues involved with cramming ten two-socket servers into the pedestal chassis, SGI can only use the Xeon L5520 processors, which have a 60 watt power envelope and which run at 2.26 GHz. If you don't fully load the machine, you can use faster and hotter 95 watt Xeon 5500 parts in the boards.
Mucho Mobo
The mobo that SGI is using for this personal super configuration have a dozen memory slots, for a max of 96 GB of memory per node, and one 2.5-inch SATA drive per node. The board has two Gigabit Ethernet ports and an optional InfiniBand adapter. These boards cannot have graphics adapters. The fully loaded machine has 80 cores, 960 GB of memory, and redundant links into the server nodes and is rated at 726 gigaflops using the L5520 processors.
Because El Reg believes in positive reinforcement, SGI should get a cookie for saying that the base price of this configuration is $7,995 including one Xeon board with 24 GB of memory and the Gigabit Ethernet switch.
The third configuration is the OC3-19DV1, which is a variant of the deskside cluster that crams nineteen MicroSlice nodes into the chassis, each one sporting a single Atom 330 processor. These run at 1.6 GHz and have a mere 1 MB of cache on the chip. This variant uses Gigabit Ethernet only as the network fabric and has only a single 2.5-inch disk on the head node in the cluster.
Each Atom node has a maximum of 2 GB of main memory, and it can have a total of 38 cores. This particular setup is not really aimed at the number-crunching style of HPC workloads, but rather the distributed Web 2.0 style of apps, and is only intended to be a development machine. No price for this version of the Octane III.
The Octane III chassis can plug into two 15-amp, 120-volt wall plugs to power itself, one 20-amp, 120-volt plug, or one 20-amp 208-230-volt plug. All of the nodes turn on and off with a single power switch, and the boxes come preconfigured from SGI's factory in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin.
All three of these configurations are available immediately. The workstation or clustered nodes can be configured with Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Novell SUSE Linux or Windows Server 2008 or Windows HPC Server 2008. The Linux cluster configurations can also be equipped with SGI's ProPack math library and Linux tunings for SGI as well as its ISLE cluster manager and Altair's PBS Pro batch scheduler.
Looking ahead, Noer says that SGI is working on a 19-node machine that uses the new Xeon 3400 "Lynnfield" processors for single-socket mother boards. The Xeon 3400s, which are part of the Nehalem family in that they support QuickPath Interconnect, made their debut two weeks ago.
These quad-core Xeon 3400 chips will have a lot more oomph than the Atom chips and their mobos and the chips themselves cost a lot less than the Xeon 5500s and their mobos. Which means the Octane III nodes based on the Xeon 3400s will offer much better bang for the buck. No word on when these might ship, however. SGI is keeping mum for now. ®