| | | SGI® introduces SGI Altix ICE, a high density integrated blade platform that offers a revolutionary new approach to scale-out high performance computing |HPC). SGI Altix ICE provides breakthrough scalability, manageability, reliability, and price/performance without the compromises inherent in many traditional HPC systems. SGI Altix ICE drives performance density to a new level, creating an environment that can support critical high-throughput applications. | | |
| | | Today's Data Centers: No Room at the Inn? Space is an issue of primary concern in today's data centers. Data centers are running out of room to house the compute resources necessary to support their organizations. This issue is particularly critical in the high performance computing, scale-out market, where high-throughput applications can require co-location of large numbers of compute nodes within a single data center. Even where space is available, HPC clusters often bump up against the data center's power and cooling limitations. An industry survey by Data Center Users' Group (http://www. datacenterug.org/) projects that 96 percent of existing data centers will run out of capacity by 2011.1 To deal with the crisis in the data center, SGI introduces SGI Altix ICE: a lean, integrated blade platform for scale-out computing. Density - From Blade to Rack The SGI Altix ICE blade has been designed with performance density in mind, all non-essentials pared away. The result is a highly dense platform, supporting up to 512 Intel® Xeon® processor cores per 42U rack. In raw compute power, this equates to 6 teraflops per rack. Despite this level of performance density, the fully loaded SGI Altix ICE rack stays within data center flooring constraints, with a footprint of 246 lb/ft.2 Among its key features, the SGI Altix ICE blade has no onboard storage, instead employing diskless booting from the individual rack unit (IRU) level. This increases blade performance density but also improves reliability by eliminating a common point of hardware failure. Power and Cooling Efficiency Data center environmental constraints extend beyond space limitations to encompass electrical power and cooling. SGI Altix ICE uses power supplies suppliers rated at 90% efficiency in the transformation of electrical power from AC to 12VDC. The optional water-based cooling system nearly eliminates any impact on ambient data center temperatures by managing to dissipate up to 95% of the rack heat in chilled water - all the while achieving significant savings in power cooling costs. The SGI Altix ICE high efficiency cooling system, combined with the IRU blade enclosure's innovative thermal design, also enables higher overall performance density. Because of its unprecedented efficiency at cooling, SGI Altix ICE is able to provide the ultimate in performance density, but at the same time efficiently dissipate the heat generated. | | |