Penguins Can Fly
New SGI® Altix® 350: Faster, Less Expensive, Production-quality Linux®!

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Come visit SGI at LinuxWorld® to see the new SGI Altix 350 and the latest advancements in Linux-based visualization. For a FREE Exhibit Pass or personalized booth tour, call (800-800-7441, prompt 1) or email.

When the Altix 3000 series was introduced in January 2003 it took the open standards community by storm, quickly garnering widespread attention and an unprecedented number of industry awards. Now—with the introduction of Altix 350—SGI makes the advanced architecture and capabilities of Altix available to a whole new set of users with a platform that delivers best-in-class price, best-in-class performance, based on open standards.

Scaling from one to sixteen 64-bit Intel® Itanium® 2 processors and up to 192GB of global shared memory in a single system, Altix 350 fills the gap between commodity Linux servers and the high performance computing capabilities of the Altix 3000, making it an ideal choice for workgroup/departmental, technical database, or throughput cluster applications. The Altix 350 system scales beyond the 2-4 processors typically supported by other Linux offerings to handle a wider range of computing problems, while, in cluster configurations, it is the perfect platform to accommodate throughput workflows.

Customers worldwide have already begun to appreciate the unique benefits of Altix 350. "To process 3D image sequences of the cardiovascular system in a distributed and parallel environment, we needed a mid-range computing server capable of providing a large amount of shared memory and multi-processor computing with greater price/performance than was previously available," said Alejandro Frangi, Ramón y Cajal Research Fellow and co-director of the Computer Vision Group within the Aragon Institute of Engineering Research and the Department Electronic Engineering and Communications, both at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. The Altix 350 system is part of a more general grid computing test bed facility recently built with support from the Spanish Ministry of Science & Technology and the University of Zaragoza. "The SGI Altix 350 easily meets those requirements, while incorporating industry-standard components like 64-bit Intel Itanium 2 processors and compilers, along with Linux and Open Source software, that are increasingly crucial to maintaining portability within our multi-platform environment."

Open Systems Pricing for the Midrange

By combining the core architectural features of Altix with an innovative packaging system, SGI has created a highly economical new platform. Starting at just $12,199 USLP, with an average configuration USLP of $5400 per processor, Altix 350 offers the demonstrated scalability and reliability of Altix at a very competitive price.

Commodity Linux servers lack the proven performance of Altix, while midrange proprietary UNIX® solutions can cost up to three times more. Altix 350 is the only open standards-based solution available to meet demanding midrange computing needs with full scalability.

"NASA has computational modeling requirements suitable for a spectrum of machines. NASA's 512-processor Altix system is an example of the high end, and we operate several commodity PC clusters within the Agency," said Bob Ciotti, Tera-Scale Applications Lead at NASA Ames Research Center. "There is clearly a need for systems in the middle range with better scaling characteristics than PC clusters yet costing much less per processor than supercomputing systems. With the right price/performance combination, a system of that character would help us make more efficient use of all our computing resources."

Designed to expand on demand through the independent scaling of processors, memory, or I/O capacity, Altix 350 allows users to optimize the system configuration to get the most from each dollar invested while flexibly adapting to changing requirements. You never have to buy more processors when what you really need is more memory or more I/O, allowing you to perfectly right-size a system for reduced total cost of ownership.

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