Purpose-Built for HPC

SGI® Altix® ICE Merges Price/Performance, Reliability and Manageability - All in a Dense, Energy-Smart Blade Platform Made for Today's Space-Constrained Data Centers.

Things have gotten pretty cool around SGI these days. That's thanks in part to the newly unveiled SGI Altix ICE, a next-generation platform that brings all the advantages of the company's expertise in high-performance computing (HPC) to a tightly integrated, cool-running blade solution.

SGI designed the new platform to close the growing gap between performance and user productivity—problem that hits HPC environments where they live.

"We repeatedly hear from our customers that first-generation clusters haven't delivered the productivity that their performance potential suggested was possible," notes SGI CEO Robert "Bo" Ewald. "This has created an increasing gap between peak performance and actual productivity."

But Ewald says the challenges in HPC environments don't end there. "Those same organizations are struggling to keep pace with the complexities of using, supporting, powering and cooling these systems."

SGI saw those challenges, and the company's answer is SGI Altix ICE. It's a new generation of system architecture — part cluster, part MPP — that delivers more of the potential performance of the system to end users. Purpose-built to handle true HPC applications and large scale-out workloads, the smaller, more energy-efficient system boosts the reliability, availability and serviceability of HPC installations.

No-Compromise Scalability

SGI® Altix® ICE 8200 is the first model in the new line of bladed servers purpose-built to handle true HPC applications and large scale-out workloads. Its ultra-dense rack architecture delivers up to 40 percent more compute performance per floor tile than competing blades. A single SGI Altix ICE 8200 rack can be powered by as many as 512 Intel® Xeon® processor cores and deliver 6 TFLOPS of performance.

Yet even as it accommodates larger and more varied workloads, SGI Altix ICE doesn't force users to accept compromises in price/performance, power and space efficiency, reliability and manageability. In fact, many of the platform's advantages - including price/performance - actually improve as customers add blades and racks.

The new platform's high compute density helps customers overcome more than "server sprawl." SGI Altix ICE features a breakthrough energy-smart design that can save organizations up to $53,000 in annual energy costs for a 10TFLOP system. And it arrives pre-integrated for easy "power up and go" deployment, allowing customers to focus on their work - not on set-up and administration.

The new system already is making a big impression on customers, including the University of Exeter in England and General Atomics in San Diego.

"General Atomics is always looking for the fastest computer because we work with increasingly large models," says Dave Wade, senior systems programming analyst, General Atomics, one of the world's leading resources for high-technology systems development. "But the capacity of our computer room is maxed, and asking it to handle more heat is not cost-effective.

"With SGI Altix ICE," says Wade, "SGI has delivered the fastest computer with a significant bonus - an exceptionally small footprint and a very, very low cost in energy. SGI Altix ICE meets every criterion, and allows our scientists and engineers to solve large models in days, rather than weeks."

Greater Density, Fewer Headaches

SGI achieved dramatic density improvements by implementing a new, highly integrated version of the "Atoka" board, which SGI co-designed with Intel Corporation. This next-generation board, designed specifically for the HPC market, allows a single SGI Altix ICE 8200 blade to be powered by two Dual- or Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors, and up to 32GB of memory.

To ensure optimal application performance and scalability, the new platform also features support for dual high-speed, low-latency Double Data Rate (DDR) InfiniBand backplanes. This enables blistering fast communication between nodes and racks, even as deployments scale to thousands of processors. By dedicating a Gigabit Ethernet network for administrative tasks, SGI has freed up the 20Gb/second DDR InfiniBand connection for compute traffic. And for optimal dynamic communication, the new system utilizes a hierarchical network topology that requires no external switching.

The integrated blade format also makes system service and maintenance easier than ever. SGI gave its new platform an elegant, cable-free individual rack unit (IRU) design and on-board InfiniBand network interface cards, thus reducing the number of failure points in every rack. SGI Altix ICE 8200 IRUs feature redundant, hot-swap power and cooling components.

With its diskless blade architecture, SGI Altix ICE also provides for "off-blade" centralization of storage resources. By moving the storage off compute blades, SGI allows customers to choose the storage option that best fits their computing environment, including SGI® InfiniteStorage solutions tailored to meet specific application demands. This "off blade" disk design further reduces cost, weight and power consumption - while enhancing reliability.

"Users are looking for clusters that can scale to much larger sizes without having to do a lot of computer science work to get there," notes Earl Joseph, IDC program vice president, High-Performance Systems, IDC. "With this new platform, SGI is addressing a number of customer pains points in system management, interconnects and running large parallel problems, while at the same time using industry standard components and removing parts like the disk drives on the blades in order to help keep the price down."

Energy-Smart for Lower Ownership Costs

With this new platform, SGI has made green HPC a reality, helping customers conquer the challenges of soaring electric and cooling expenses, and maximizing the reliable life of the new platform by ensuring it runs cool.

SGI took advantage of energy-conscious and field-proven innovations originally developed for its Intel® Itanium® processor-based Altix® line, equipping SGI Altix ICE with an energy-smart power architecture that realizes more than 90 percent efficiency on its 12-volt DC front-end power supply, up to 87 percent efficiency on compute blades, and up to 76 percent efficiency at the rack level.

The new platform also boasts SGI's new, third-generation water-cooled door design - an ideal option for customers deploying large and dense configurations. Chilled water running through the unique hinged door carries away up to 95 percent of the heat generated by an SGI Altix ICE system. More than 250 water-cooled doors have already been installed and proven reliable on existing SGI Altix systems worldwide.

Because server cooling can add 50 to 100 percent to power consumption costs, these SGI breakthroughs equate to significant savings for customers who face rapidly compounding costs as they try to supply power to their data centers, while keeping them cool enough to maximize product life. For a large deployment, these efficiencies can mean hundreds of thousands of dollars in cost savings every year.

'Power Up and Go' Productivity

Building on two decades of experience developing "power up and go" solutions, SGI has unveiled a system that can have user applications up and running in a single day, with 6TFLOPS per rack to drive immediate productivity.

"Our 128-core SGI Altix ICE system arrived in the morning and it was running that afternoon," says Matthew Bate, professor of theoretical astrophysics at the University of Exeter. The university's astrophysics group plans to use its new SGI Altix ICE platform to simulate the formation of stars and planets.

"All the system software came pre-installed, which is helping to make system management and training extremely easy. When a university can achieve rapid productivity on a powerful system like SGI Altix ICE, it makes for some very excited researchers."

Exeter wasn't alone. "We've been impressed with how quickly SGI Altix ICE was installed and configured," adds General Atomics' Wade. "With SGI Altix ICE, we had an entirely new HPC platform up and running in almost record time."

Essential to the SGI Altix ICE line's immediate productivity is the SGI® Conductor software solution stack, a comprehensive array of essential components that comes pre-installed with every SGI Altix ICE 8200 system. The software stack includes one of two cluster management software options: SGI® Tempo, which leverages open source OSCAR application components and allows administrators to flexibly monitor and manage their deployment at the blade, chassis and rack and system levels; or Scali Manage™, which optimizes the deployment and ongoing administration of SGI Altix ICE systems by combining the most complete, integrated and flexible cluster management and monitoring system commercially available. The software stack also includes: industry-standard SUSE® Linux® Enterprise Server 10; the SGI® ProPack™ 5 Software for Linux OS; Altair® PBS Professional™ 9.0 workload management software; and the InfiniBand Fabric and Subnet Management environment.

Sign of Things to Come

Leading HPC software vendors already have voiced their support for the new system. Meanwhile, there are indications that the groundbreaking features found in SGI Altix ICE may well be a sign of things to come - not only for SGI, but for the HPC market at large.

Notes IDC's Earl Joseph: "We expect that many of the design trends that SGI is introducing in SGI Altix ICE to be common in high performance blade-based systems in the future."