Features and Benefits

Altix 3700 Bx2 extends SGI's industry leadership in standards-based HPC—delivering top sustained performance in addition to ease of use, investment protection and total flexibility in application deployment.

Feature Benefit
Up to 512 processors tightly coupled and operating under a single copy of the O/S The SGI NUMAflex computing design provides global shared memory with 6.4 GB/sec bandwidth and latency less than 1 microsecond. All resources in the system are managed through a single instance of the operating system—the industry's largest single system image. Altix 3700 Bx2 features NUMAlink 4, SGI's latest high performance router. These features deliver:
  • Fastest time-to-solution for capability applications and best job throughput for mixed capacity workloads.
  • Flexibility for the widest range of HPC workloads.
  • Ease of use for apps development, optimization and administration.
Truly Modular
Design and Implementation		 The SGI Altix 3700 Bx2 system provides performance and real scalability with its NUMAflex modular computing design. There is no central bus or switch-only modules and NUMAlink cables. System resources such as CPU, memory or I/O can be scaled independently. Benefits are:

Buy and independently scale the resources needed—a system balanced for your apps and use.

Investment protection takes on new meaning with the ability to independently upgrade, expand or swap system resources to keep up with changing user demands, organizational structures and technology improvements.

Extreme capability in memory and I/O New performance frontiers with very large memory—up to 24 TB of globally addressable memory

Breakthrough performance enhancement with Peer I/O—Altix 3700 Bx2 introduces the capability of Peer I/O, which is the industry's first direct-attach I/O technology.

Complete HPC solution on Linux Performance acceleration—SGI's complete development and administration environment, including Intel compilers, SGI libraries and third party development, analysis and optimization tools, provides the environment necessary for great performance.

The most scalable, fastest and most complete data management infrastructure on Linux from the clustered CXFS™ filesystem to NAS and SAN servers, hierarchical storage management software and record-breaking backup, Altix 3700 Bx2 has the most complete data solution on Linux today.

System and component redundancy and diagnostics for RAS Inherent reliability On top of the inherent reliability features that are built into the Itanium 2 processors, SGI builds reliability into each of the modules in the Altix 3700 Bx2 system. Power supplies and cooling fans are N+1 redundant and can be replaced without system downtime in the event of failure. The SGI Altix 3700 Bx2 system also uses the same diagnostic controller subsystem as the SGI® Origin® 3000 system has used for many years. This subsystem reports intermittent errors and recommends preemptive remedial action to on-site or remote SGI service personnel.