Imagine the ability to harness the brightest minds on the planet to solve challenging computational problems. Then envision a world in which you could not only tap the greatest intellects, but could do so simultaneously, with each contributor sharing information and deductions as the work was progressing.

That's the concept behind the new SGI Altix 3000 family of servers and superclusters. SGI Altix 3000 employs scalable 64-bit Linux clustering to create what is simply the world's most powerful open-source computing environment. Thanks to its implementation of global shared memory, its optimized operating environment, and its ability to scale to 64 processors in a single Linux OS image, SGI Altix 3000 enables extraordinary capability breakthroughs compared with traditional Linux clusters. The SGI Altix 3000 family allows users to solve highly complex computational problems in record time.

With the SGI Altix 3000 family, SGI has created a compelling new offering in what is quickly becoming a renaissance in the way the world thinks of supercomputing. What's important today is not theoretical performance but actual and sustainable throughput. For those whose needs include the implementation of Linux open-source standards, SGI Altix 3000 expands horizons by creating an entirely new understanding of the capabilities of high-performance computing.

The companies that succeed today are those that can solve manufacturing, design, and exploration problems more efficiently than the competition. To do so requires high-performance computers that can analyze and move terabytes of data faster than ever before. SGI Altix 3000 provides those key capabilities, enabling the thousands of Linux applications developed worldwide to run in an environment that offers dramatically improved performance compared with commodity hardware. Now even the largest data sets can be handled and analyzed with ease, with solutions developed in record time.

World's First Global Shared-Memory Cluster

Only the SGI Altix 3000 family is designed around a scalable memory architecture that analyzes data sets as whole entities, without breaking them up into smaller segments to be handled by individual processors. Consequently, the programmer does not need to spend time developing rules to divide the data into smaller sets. Using SGI Altix 3000, problem solving happens faster on a system that is easier to administer and maintain.

The SGI Altix 3000 family scales from four to hundreds of Intel^® Itanium^® 2 processors with global shared memory and an optimized 64-bit environment. The system can be configured with several terabytes of memory. And every memory module can be shared among every processor node in the configuration, maximizing the efficient use of all available memory, all the time.

Not only can processors share memory, but they also do so literally at lightning speed. Information is sped between cluster nodes in as little as 50 nanoseconds--less time than it takes a beam of light to travel 50 feet--up to 200 times faster than standard clustering switches. As a result, data transfer bottlenecks are nonexistent because processors don't waste idle cycles waiting for data from memory to arrive.

A Cluster with Supercomputing Lineage

The SGI Altix 3000 supercluster is powered by the third-generation SGI^® NUMAflex^TM supercomputing architecture. The hallmark of SGI^® supercomputers is their outstanding data-handling characteristics, which provide truly balanced scalable performance. SGI Altix 3000 is the world's first Linux cluster with the global shared-memory capabilities of a supercomputer.

(continued...)	page 1 | 2
SGI Linux Environment 7.2 is based on Red Hat Linux 7.2 but is not sponsored by or endorsed by Red Hat, Inc. in any way. Linux penguin logo created by Larry Ewing.