SGI® Altix® 450

image of an SGI Altix 450

Revolutionary Mid-range Server Delivers New Levels of Data throughput, Efficiency and Flexibility with a Modular Blade Design

System Highlights

  • Modular blade design for 'plug and solve' flexibility
  • Scalable system size for simplified programming, administration and sustained throughput
  • End-to-End high efficiency means a TCO you will love

Datasheet (PDF 305K)

Modular Design for Superior Throughput and "Plug & Solve" Configurability
SGI Altix 450 servers are configured from interchangeable compute, memory, I/O and special purpose blades for 'plug and solve' configuration flexibility. The innovative blade-to-NUMAlink® architecture enables users to mix and match eight standardized blade choices, for perfect system right-sizing. The compact blade packaging of the Altix 450 rack also provides excellent performance density - up to a teraflop per tall rack - as well as industry-leading power efficiency.

Scalable System Size for Simplified Programming, Low-cost Administration and Excellent Sustained Throughput for Diverse Applications
SGI Altix 450 incorporates the shared-memory NUMAflex® architecture, which simplifies software development, workload management and system administration. It supports up to 38 sockets (76 cores) under one instance of Linux and up to 864GB of globally addressable memory. Supporting these powerful capabilities is the NUMAlink interconnect, which leads the industry in bandwidth and latency for superior performance on cluster applications. The SGI Altix 450 represents a versatile solution for shared or distributed memory applications.

Standards-based Platform Reduces Cost While Delivering Uncompromised Performance on Linux
SGI Altix 450 servers have been designed specifically for demanding users based on industry standard cpus, memory and I/O. This infrastructure is supported by a complete solution stack running on industry standard Linux® operating systems with the choice of SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server or Red Hat® Enterprise Linux Advanced Server operating systems. SGI® ProPack™ software provides the tools and enabling software to optimize performance for Altix systems running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server OS.

Features and Benefits

Feature Benefit
Modular, functional blade design

Dual socket compute blades supporting dual-core Intel® Itanium® 2 processors code-named Montecito, plus I/O and memory expansion graphics and SGI® RASC™ blades
  • Unlimited flexibility and fine-grained control over system configuration
  • Excellent performance density and power efficiency
  • Optimize for any workload
Compatible with future technology

Socket compatible with future Intel Itanium 2 processors, including dual core CPU's code-named Montecito and Montvale
  • Investment protection
  • Expand on demand
  • Easily upgrade or service individual components
SGI® NUMAflex® Architecture for Scalable System Size

Scales to 38 socket or 76 core system size and as much as 456GB globally addressable memory
  • Superior sustained performance for any programming model or workload
  • Simplified programming
  • Easy, low-cost administration
NUMAlink 4 interconnect, Best MPI support
  • 6.4 GB/s bandwidth, <1 microsecond latency
  • SGI Message Passing Toolkit
  • Industry-leading cluster application efficiency to hundreds of processors or more
  • Scale out to hundreds or thousands of CPU cores while retaining global memory address
SGI RAS Roadmap
  • Fault prevention, detection, recovery
  • Special focus on memory RAS
  • Serviceability of blades
  • Linux® performance and choice without compromised reliability
  • Maximum uptime, higher utilization
Standards-based design
Commodity CPU's, memory, I/O
  • Leading price-performance versus high-end RISC/Unix servers
  • SGI-level quality at affordable cost
Certified on Industry-standard Linux
Choice of SUSE or RedHat

SGI supplied and supported
  • Easier system bring-up
  • One-stop support