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Altix

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Altix is a line of servers and supercomputers produced by Silicon Graphics, based on Intel processors. It succeeded the MIPS/IRIX-based Origin 3000 servers.

The line was first announced[1] on January 7, 2003, with the Altix 3000 series, based on Intel Itanium 2 processors and SGI's NUMAlink processor interconnect. At product introduction, the system supported up to 64 processors running Linux as a single system image and shipped with a Linux distribution called SGI Advanced Linux Environment, which was compatible with Red Hat Advanced Server. By August 2003, many SGI Altix customers[2] were running Linux on 128p and even 256p SGI Altix systems, but SGI officially announced 256-processor support[3] within a single system image of Linux on March 10, 2004 using an 2.4-based kernel. The SGI Advanced Linux Environment was eventually dropped after support using a standard, unmodified SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) distribution for SGI Altix was provided with SLES 8[4] and SLES 9[5]. Later, SGI Altix 512-processor systems were officially supported[6] using unmodified, standard Linux distribution with the launch of SLES 9 SP1. Besides full support of SGI Altix on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, a standard and unmodified Red Hat Enterprise Linux was also fully supported starting with SGI Altix 3700 Bx2 with RHEL 4[7] and RHEL 5[8] with system processor limits defined by Red Hat for those releases.

On 14 November 2005, SGI introduced the Altix 4000 series based on the Itanium 2.[9] The Altix 3000 and 4000 are distributed shared memory multiprocessors. SGI later officially supported 1024-processors systems on an unmodified, standard Linux distribution with the launch of SLES 10[10] in July 2006. SGI Altix 4700 was also officially supported by Red Hat with RHEL 4[11] and RHEL 5[12]—maximum processor limits were as defined by Red Hat for its RHEL releases.

The Altix brand has been also used for a variety of systems based on multi-core Intel Xeon processors. These includes the Altix XE rackmount servers, Altix ICE blade servers and Altix UV supercomputers.

NASA's Columbia supercomputer, installed in 2004, is a 10,240-microprocessor cluster of twenty Altix 3000 systems, each with 512 microprocessors, interconnected with InfiniBand.

Altix 3000

The Altix 3000 was the first generation of Altix systems. It was succeeded by the Altix 4000 in 2004, and the last model was discontinued on 31 December 2006.

Altix 330

The Altix 330 is an entry-level server. Unlike the high-end models, the Altix 330 is not "brick" based, but is instead based on 1U-high compute modules mounted in a rack and connected with NUMAlink. A single system may contain 1 to 16 Itanium 2 processors and 2 to 128 GB of memory.

Altix 350

The Altix 350 is a mid-range model which supports up to 32 Itanium 2 processors.

Altix 1330

The Altix 1330 is a cluster of Altix 330 systems. The systems are networked with gigabit Ethernet or 4X Infiniband.

Altix 1350

The Altix 1350 is a cluster of Altix 350 systems.

Altix 3300

The Altix 3300 is a mid-range model supporting 4 to 12 processors and 2 to 48 GB of memory. It is packaged in a short (17U) rack.

Altix 3700

The Altix 3700 is a high-end model supporting 16 to 512 processors and 8 GB to 2 TB of memory. It requires one or multiple tall (39U) rack(s). A variant of the Altix 3000 with graphics capability is known as the Prism.

It is based on the third generation NUMAflex distributed shared memory architecture and it uses the NUMAlink 4 interconnection fabric. The Altix 3000 supports a single system image of 64 processors. If there are more than 64 processors in a system, then the system must be partitioned.

The basic building block is the C-brick. Each C-brick contains two nodes. A C-brick is a 4U high rackmount unit. Each node contains two Intel Itanium 2 processors which connects to the Super-Bedrock ASIC through a single front side bus. The Super-Bedrock ASIC is a crossbar for the processors, the local RAM, the network interface and the I/O interface. The two Super-Bedrock ASICs in each brick are connected internally by a single 6.4 GB/s NUMAlink 4 channel. A processor node also contains 16 DIMM slots that accept standard DDR1 DIMMs with capacities of 4 to 16 GB.

Altix 3700 Bx2

The Altix 3700 Bx2 is a high-end model supporting 16 to 2,048 Itanium 2 processors and 12 GB to 24 TB of memory. It requires one or multiple tall (40U) rack(s).

Altix 4000

The Altix 4000 is Silicon Graphics' current Itanium-based product line. It is composed of two models, the Altix 450, a mid-range server, and the Altix 4700, a high-end server.

An Altix 4700 system can contain up to 2048 dual-core Itanium 2 and Itanium ("Montvale" revision) microprocessor sockets, which are connected by the NUMAlink 4 interconnect in a hypercube network topology. The microprocessors are accompanied by up to 128 TB of memory (192TB with single microprocessor socket blades and 16GB DIMMs).

These systems are based on nodes contained within a blade that plugs into an enclosure, the individual rack unit (IRU). The IRU is a 10U enclosure that contains the necessary components to support the blades such as the power supplies, two router boards (one for every five blades) and a L1 controller. Each IRU can support ten single-wide blades or two double-wide blades and eight single-width blades. The IRUs are mounted in 42U-high rack, and each rack supports up to four IRUs.

There are two types of node, processor and memory, which are contained within a blade. Compute blades contain a processor node and consist of two PAC611 sockets for Itanium 2 and Itanium microprocessors, a Super-Hub (SHub) application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) (chipset) and eight dual in-line memory module (DIMM) slots for memory. The number of microprocessor sockets in a compute blade is one or two. One-processor socket configurations provide more bandwidth as only one microprocessor socket is using the front side bus and local memory. Two-processor socket configurations do not support hyperthreading. Memory blades are used to expand the amount of memory without increasing the number of processors. They contain a SHub ASIC and 12 DIMM slots. Both compute and memory blades support 1, 2 4, 8, and 16 GB DIMMs. SGI support does not currently support any installations with 16GB DIMMs.

Multiple servers in configurations described above can be combined on the same Numalink fabric up to the theoretical maximum of 8,192 nodes (16,384 OS cpus).

Altix XE

The Altix XE servers are based on Intel Xeon x86-64-architecture processors. Models include the:

  • Altix XE210 server supported up to two Dual or Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors, 5100 Series or 5300 series, 32GB DDR2 667 MHz FBDIMM memory, 1 x PCIe x8 (low profile) and 1 x PCI-X 133 MHz (full height) PCI slots, and Three SATA/SAS drive bays.
  • Altix XE240 server supported up to two Dual or Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors, 5100 Series or 5300 series, 32GB DDR2 667 MHz FBDIMM memory, two PCI slots configuration options (option 1: 2 x PCIe x4 (low profile), 2 x PCIe x4 (full height), 1 x PCEe x8 (full height); or option 2: 2 x PCIe x4 (low profile), 3 x PCI-X 133 MHz (full height), 1 x PCI-X 133 MHz (full height), and Five SATA/SAS drive bays.
  • Altix XE250 server
  • Altix XE270 server is a 2U configuration with Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, Choice of up to 18 DDR3 DIMMs (2GB, 4GB, or 8GB DIMMs), 2 x PCIe x8 gen 2 (low profile), 1 x PCIe x4 gen 1 (low profile), 2 x PCI-x 133/100 (low profile) PCI slots, Eight SATA or SAS drive bays with optional hardware RAID (0, 1, 5, 6, 10),
  • Altix XE310 server was introduced January 8, 2007 and contained two nodes per XE310, up to four Dual or Quad-Core Intel Itanium Xeon processors, 5100 Series or 5300 series (two per node), 64GB DDR2 667 MHz FBDIMM memory (32GB per node), 2 x PCIe x8 (1 per node) PCI slots, and Four SATA/SAS drive bays (two per node).
  • Altix XE320 server
  • Altix XE340 server contains 2 compute nodes within a 1U configuration, Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, Choice of up to 12 DDR3 DIMMs per node (2GB, 4GB, or 8GB DIMMs), 2 x PCIe x16 (1 per node) - low profile PCI slot, and Four SATA drive bays (2 per node) with optional SAS and hardware RAID 0, 1.
  • Altix XE500 server is a 3U configuration with Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, Choice of up to 18 DDR3 DIMMs (2GB, 4GB, or 8GB DIMMs), 2 x PCIe x16 gen2 (full height) and 4 x PCIe x8 gen2 (full height) PCI slots, and Eight SATA or SAS drives with optional hardware RAID (0, 1, 5, 6, 10).
  • Altix XE1200 cluster
  • Altix XE1300 cluster

All Altix XE systems supported Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Microsoft Windows. Later, VMware support was added across the Altix XE product line.

Altix ICE

The Altix ICE blade platform is an Intel Xeon-based system featuring diskless compute blades and a Hierarchical Management Framework (HMF) for scalability, performance, and resiliency. While the earlier Itanium-based Altix systems ran a single-system image (SSI) Linux kernel on 1024 processors or more using a standard SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) distribution, the Altix ICE's clustering capabilities uses standard SLES or Red Hat Enterprise Linux distributions and scales to over 51,200 cores on NASA's Pleiades supercomputer.[citation needed]

The Altix ICE 8200LX blade enclosure featured two 4x DDR IB switch blade and one high performing plane, while the Altix ICE 8200EX featured four 4x DDR IB switch blades, and two high performing planes. Both configurations supported either hypercube or fat tree topology, and 16 compute blades within an IRU.

The IP-83 and IP-85 compute blades supported Intel Xeon 5200 or 5400 Series processors, and the IP-95 compute blade supported Intel Xeon 5500 Series processors.

Altix UV

The Altix UV supercomputer architecture was announced in November 2009. Codenamed Ultraviolet during development, the Altix UV combines a development of the NUMAlink interconnect used in the Altix 4000 (NUMAlink 5) with quad-, six- or eight-core "Nehalem-EX" Intel Xeon processors. Altix UV systems run either SuSE Linux Enterprise Server or Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and scale from 32 to 2,048 cores with support for up to 16 terabytes of shared memory in a single system image.[13]

Notes

  1. ^ [1]
  2. ^ [2]
  3. ^ [3]
  4. ^ [4]
  5. ^ [5]
  6. ^ [6]
  7. ^ [7]
  8. ^ [8]
  9. ^ Silicon Graphics, Inc. (14 November 2005). SGI Launches New Flagship Altix 4000 Platform. (Press release).
  10. ^ [9]
  11. ^ [10]
  12. ^ [11]
  13. ^ "SGI Unveils Altix UV, the World's Fastest Supercomputer". www.sgi.com. Silicon Graphics International. 2009-11-16. Retrieved 2009-11-18.

References

  • Silicon Graphics, Inc. (12 June 2007). Altix 3000 Rackmount Owner's Guide.
  • Silicon Graphics, Inc. (12 June 2007). SGI Altix 1330 Cluster Datasheet.
  • Silicon Graphics, Inc. (12 June 2007). SGI Altix 330 Server Datasheet.
  • Silicon Graphics, Inc. (12 June 2007). SGI Altix 350 Server Datasheet.
  • Silicon Graphics, Inc. (12 June 2007). SGI Altix 3700 Bx2 Servers and Supercomputers Datasheet.
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