SGI unveils ultra-dense SGI Altix Ice Blade

Bangalore, June 27: SGI, a leader in high-performance server and storage solutions, today unveiled SGI Altix Ice, a next-generation platform that brings all the advantages of the company's expertise in high-performance computing (HPC) to a tightly integrated and cool-running blade solution.

The super computing platform designed by SGI was aimed to close the gap between performance and user productivity. ICE 8200 server will be available at a market price starting from USD 3.5 lakh.

Speaking to newspersons here, SGI Director Ravi Pendekanti said the product was the first in a new line of bladed servers purpose-built to handle true HPC application and large scale-out workloads.

SGI achieved the density improvements by implementing a new, highly integrated version of the 'Atoka' board, which the company co-designed with Intel Corporation.

Ice enables large scale-out environments while minimising their demands on the data centre's space and power. Its ultra-dense rack architecture delivers up to 40 per cent more compute performance per floor tile than competing blades. A single Ice 8200 rack can be powered by as many as 512 Intel Xeon processor cores and deliver six TFLOPS of performance, he said.

''Around the world, ICE systems have already been installed in a number of customer sites, including the University of Exeter in Britain and General Atomics in San Diego,'' Ravi said.

UNI