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| Manufacturer | Silicon Graphics, Inc. |
|---|---|
| Type | Server,supercomputer |
| Released | January 7, 2003 (2003-01-07) |
| Discontinued | 2011 |
| Operating system | Linux,Microsoft Windows |
| CPU | Itanium 2,Xeon |
| Memory | 2 GB to 192 TB |
| Connectivity | USB |
| Predecessor | Origin 300 |
| Related | SGI Prism,SGI Virtu |
| Website | http://www.sgi.com/products/servers/altix/Archived 2005-12-12 at theWayback Machine |
Altix is a line ofserver computers andsupercomputers produced bySilicon Graphics (and successor companySilicon Graphics International), based onIntelprocessors. It succeeded theMIPS/IRIX-basedOrigin 3000 servers.
The line was first announced on January 7, 2003, with theAltix 3000 series, based onIntelItanium 2 processors and SGI'sNUMAlink processor interconnect.[1]At product introduction, the system supported up to 64 processors runningLinux as asingle system image and shipped with a Linux distribution called SGI Advanced Linux Environment, which was compatible withRed Hat Advanced Server.
By August 2003, many SGI Altix customers were running Linux on 128- and 256-processor SGI Altix systems.[2] SGI officially announced 256-processor support within a single system image of Linux on March 10, 2004, using a 2.4-basedLinux kernel.[3] The SGI Advanced Linux Environment was eventually dropped after support using a standard, unmodifiedSUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) distribution for SGI Altix was provided with SLES 8[4] and SLES 9.[4]
Later, SGI Altix 512-processor systems were officially supported[5] using an unmodified, standard Linux distribution with the launch of SLES 9 SP1. Besides full support of SGI Altix onSUSE Linux Enterprise Server, a standard and unmodifiedRed Hat Enterprise Linux was also fully supported starting with SGI Altix 3700 Bx2 with RHEL 4[6] and RHEL 5[7] with system processor limits defined by Red Hat for those releases.
On November 14, 2005, SGI introduced the Altix 4000 series based on the Itanium 2.[8] The Altix 3000 and 4000 aredistributed shared memorymultiprocessors. SGI later officially supported 1024-processor systems on an unmodified, standard Linux distribution with the launch of SLES 10[9] in July 2006. SGI Altix 4700 was also officially supported by Red Hat with RHEL 4[10] and RHEL 5[11] — maximum processor limits were as defined by Red Hat for its RHEL releases.
The Altix brand was used for systems based onmulti-core IntelXeon processors. These include the Altix XErackmount servers, Altix ICEblade servers and Altix UV supercomputers.
NASA'sColumbiasupercomputer, installed in 2004 and decommissioned in 2013, was a 10240-microprocessor cluster of twenty Altix 3000 systems, each with 512 microprocessors, interconnected withInfiniBand.
The Altix 3000 is the first generation of Altix systems. It was succeeded by the Altix 4000 in 2004, and the last model was discontinued on December 31, 2006.
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 withNUMAlink. A single system may contain 1 to 16 Itanium 2 processors and 2 to 128 GB of memory.
The Altix 1330 is acluster of Altix 330 systems. The systems are networked withGigabit Ethernet or 4XInfiniBand.
The Altix 350 is a mid-range model that supports up to 32 Itanium 2 processors. Introduced in 2005, it runsLinux, rather than SGI's ownUnix variant,IRIX. The Altix 350 is scalable from one to thirty-two64-bitIntelItaniumprocessors. It featuresDDR SDRAM andPCI-X expansion ports, and can supportSCSI orSATA internalhard drives. Designed as a rack-mount server, the Altix 350 is 2U, meaning it occupies two slots vertically in a standardserver rack. The Altix 1350 is a cluster of Altix 350 systems.
As of December 2006[update], the Altix 350 was superseded by the Altix 450 (based on theItanium 2) and the Altix XE (based on theXeon).
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.
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 thePrism.
The 3700 is based on the third generation NUMAflexdistributed shared memory architecture and it uses theNUMAlink 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 called a C-brick, which contains two nodes in a 4U high rackmount unit. Each node contains twoIntelItanium 2 processors that connect to the Super-Bedrockapplication-specific integrated circuit through a singlefront-side bus. The Super-Bedrock is acrossbar switch for the processors, the local RAM, the network interface and the I/O interface. The two Super-BedrockASICs in each brick are connected internally by a single 6.4 GB/s NUMAlink 4 channel. Aprocessor node also contains 16DIMM slots that accept standardDDR DIMMs with capacities of 4 to 16 GB.
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) racks.
The Altix 4000 is the next Itanium-based product line. It has two models, the Altix 450 a mid-range server, and the Altix 4700 a high-end server.
An Altix 4700 system contains up to 2048 dual-core Itanium 2 and Itanium ("Montvale" revision) microprocessor sockets, connected by theNUMAlink 4 interconnect in afat tree network topology.[12] The microprocessors are accompanied by up to 128 TB of memory (192 TB with single microprocessor socket blades and 16 GB DIMMs).
Each node is contained within ablade 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.
Two types of node, processor and memory, 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 eightdual 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 support any installations with 16 GB DIMMs.
Multiple servers can be combined on the same Numalink fabric up to the theoretical maximum of 8,192 nodes (16,384 OS CPUs).
The Altix XE servers use IntelXeonx86-64-architecture processors. Models include:
All Altix XE systems support NovellSUSE Linux Enterprise Server,Red Hat Enterprise Linux, andMicrosoft Windows.VMware support was added across the Altix XE product line.
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 run asingle-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 use standard SLES or Red Hat Enterprise Linux distributions and scale to over 51,200 cores onNASA'sPleiadessupercomputer.[citation needed]
The Altix ICE 8200LX blade enclosure features two 4x DDR IB switch blade and one high-performing plane, and the Altix ICE 8200EX features four 4x DDR IB switch blades, and two high-performing planes. Both configurations support eitherhypercube orfat tree topology, and 16 compute blades within an IRU.
The IP-83 and IP-85 compute blades support Intel Xeon 5200 or 5400 Series processors, and the IP-95 compute blade support Intel Xeon 5500 Series processors.
In November 2011 the ICE 8400 is based on either Intel Xeon 5500 or 5600 processors or the AMD Opteron 6100 series processors.
As of 2013[update], these use theXeon Phi coprocessors.[13]
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 7500 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 (TB) of shared memory in a single system image.[14]
In 2010 and 2011, SGI retired the Altix name for new servers produced by the company. Altix UV and Altix ICE have been shortened to "SGI UV" and "SGI ICE," while the Altix XE line is named "Rackable."