SGI has announced the Altix ICE 8400, the next generation of the Altix ICE scale-out high performance computing (HPC) blade platform.
Altix ICE 8400 contains significant enhancements over prior Altix ICE generations, including through and through Quad Data Rate InfiniBand interconnect. SGI’s integrated backplane sports up to three times the link-to-node bandwidth relative to competitive QDR InfiniBand clusters to maximise performance where most job traffic occurs. Altix ICE 8400 supports up to 128 processors (1,536 cores) per cabinet with support for 130W CPU sockets. Three on-board Mellanox ConnectX-2 InfiniBand HCA compute blade configurations are also supported, and include single-port, dual-port or two single-port chipsets.
Altix ICE 8400, with its blade design, easily and affordably scales to up to 65,536 compute nodes with integrated single or dual plane InfiniBand backplane interconnect. Open x86 architecture makes it equally simple to deploy commercial, open source or custom applications on completely unmodified Novell SUSE or Red Hat Linux operating systems.
