The delays in Tukwila have hurt SGI’s NUMA sales, and the new Altix UV gives much better price/performance than Itanium could ever deliver. I predicted (Project Ultraviolet and the future of Itanium Altix) that we’d see a final Itanium Altix using Tukwila later this year, before the Itanium line was killed off.

With no product announcement from SGI to accompany the Intel fanfare, and with SGI’s Cyclone cloud offering accidentally offering a neat Itanium to x86 migration platform, it looks like we could finally be seeing the death of Itanium within SGI’s product line.

Silicon Graphics went there in the past with the R8000 MIPS CPU – it had the potential for massive performance, but only if you optimised the code and really knew what you were doing. That level of investment is always a niche game, and with the lower price and better performance for less effort from x86, Itanium was always going to struggle in the long term.

It’s just a shame SGI had to go bankrupt twice and shed a load of talented and skilled engineers to learn the lesson.

Related Posts:

• Project Ultraviolet and the future of Itanium Altix
• Will we be seeing big Nehalem Altix boxes from SGI this year?
• Intel’s Nehalem opens up some options for Silicon Graphics
• Impressive SPEC benchmarks from SGI
• Another 9 percent to go at Silicon Graphics

The offering is non virtualised (what’s called “single tenancy”) which addresses the main stumbling block to using cloud compute resources for HPC – the overhead of that virtualisation layer. The other stumbling block – how to actually get your data onto the cloud – is addressed by being able to ship drives of data direct to SGI, who will preload it into your compute instance for you.

On the hardware side, Cyclone offers a nice possibility of “try before buy” for compute customers, with SGI’s entire product range available, packed with some GPU and accelerator goodness:

The SGI technology at Cyclone’s core is comprised of some of the world’s fastest supercomputing hardware architectures, including SGI® Altix® scale-up, Altix® ICE scale-out and Altix® XE hybrid clusters, all based on Intel® Xeon® or Itanium® processors. The hybrid architecture offers either NVIDIA® Tesla GPUs or AMD FireStream™ GPU compute accelerators for floating point double precision workloads, and Tilera accelerators for integer workloads. High performance SGI InfiniteStorage systems are available for scratch space and long-term archival of customer data.

Itanium and x86 offerings would offer customers a great way to port their apps from Itanium and onto the new Altix UV platform. But I’m sure SGI would never have done that intentionally. Ahem.

On the software side, SGI will be pre-installing many commonly used technical computing applications:

With Cyclone’s SaaS (Software as a Service) model, SGI delivers access to leading-edge open source applications and best-of-breed commercial software platforms from top Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). Supported applications include: OpenFOAM, NUMECA, Acusolve, LS-Dyna, Gaussian, Gamess, NAMD, Gromacs, LAMMPS, BLAST, FASTA, HMMER, ClustalW and OntoStudio. SGI expects to add additional domains and applications partners over time

SGI are mixing it up with Penguin and NewServers, coming in at a higher price but arguably offering more value by pre-loading software, and enabling users to migrate to in-house SGI hardware later on down the line. Costs are also high compared to Amazon, but really, I can’t see anyone putting HPC or technical compute apps on Amazon’s offering.

You can read more in SGI’s press release here.

Related Posts:

• Institute of Cancer Research deploys an SGI Altix UV super
• University of Tasmania’s new SGI Altix ICE cluster for climate modelling
• SGI launches Altix UV
• SGI at SC09
• New Top500 list out

Revenue is up to over $90m but SGI still posted a loss of $23m. The last few quarters have been spent consolidating operations and reducing costs, so the loss isn’t as bad as it has been.

A quick aside on one of the quirks of the HPC market. Rules mean that SGI can’t book revenue from HPC installations until they’ve been qualified, and if it’s a multi-year deal they have to book those revenues across the year. This always makes the business look a lot more shaky than it is, which is why they also report non-GAAP figures, which get around this.

According to this, revenues were up at just over $150m with a profit of just over $2m. According to details on the call, SGI are gunning for over $500m in sales this year.

The new Altix UV systems have a lot of promise. Now that Oracle have completed their Sun merger, looking at Sun’s future roadmap their involvement in HPC – both at the hardware and software level – looks doubtful.

This leaves a nice gap for SGI to exploit, and at the lower end HP and Dell don’t have much to offer apart from clusters. With new products and a server market that’s starting to pick up, SGI are well positioned to do well this year.

You can read the full details here.

Related Posts:

• Excellent article from HPCWire analysing SGI’s financial results
• Silicon Graphics announces Q2 loss
• Too little, too late – Tukwila Itanium is released
• Cyclone – SGI’s Technical Compute Cloud
• Institute of Cancer Research deploys an SGI Altix UV super

The Institute of Cancer Research have announced that they are the latest to deploy an Altix UV. Although the press release is short on specs of the machine, it looks like large Single System Image (SSI) machines are still in demand, despite the overwhelming dominance of clusters in HPC.

Altix UV will provide the ICR with a massively scalable shared memory system to process its growing data requirements, including hundreds of terabytes of data for biological networks, MRI imaging, mass-spectrometry, phenotyping, genetics and deep-sequencing information across thousands of CPUs.

SGI needed some lower cost NUMA SSI machines – some would argue since the disastrous migration away from MIPS – and the Nehalem base Altix UV has been a long time coming. Hopefully this will mark an upturn in SGI’s fortunes. The full press release can be viewed here.

Related Posts:

• University of Tasmania’s new SGI Altix ICE cluster for climate modelling
• Time lapse supercomputer installation
• SGI Altix Systems Make Giant Leap to 21 Terabytes of Globally Addressable Memory at Customer Sites
• Silicon Graphics Deploys Ireland’s Fastest Supercomputer in Just One Day
• Too little, too late – Tukwila Itanium is released

To support the new program, the company announced the SGI Channel Network Portal, a single point of web access to a comprehensive set of value-add sales and marketing tools for program partners, including a quote configurator, promotions, demand generation, training modules and opportunity registration.

What’s more interesting is the hint that SGI will be moving to making custom solutions available only through selected partners (presumably with some special value adding secret sauce):

SGI partners serve customers across vertical segments, including government, energy, manufacturing, Internet and cloud, financial services, digital media, and research and education. The SGI Channel Network Program offers increased support to address these high-value markets and meet the ever-growing customer requirements for HPC and data center solutions. SGI partners have access to the entire portfolio of SGI products, including new channel-oriented solutions for which partners will be the primary route to market.

Emphasis in the last sentence is mine. What new HPC toys can we expect to see from this new route to market?

The full press release from SGI can be found here, and the new SGI Channel Network portal can be found here.

Related Posts:

• Too little, too late – Tukwila Itanium is released
• Cyclone – SGI’s Technical Compute Cloud
• SGI reports Q2 financial results
• Institute of Cancer Research deploys an SGI Altix UV super
• University of Tasmania’s new SGI Altix ICE cluster for climate modelling

‘Katabatic’ has a total of 512 processors and a terabyte of RAM, and will be used for Antartic and South Pacific climate modelling.

Thirty full-time TPAC users and more than 100 university researchers in the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre (ACE CRC), the Australian Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS), the School of Chemistry, the School of Maths and Physics, and the Menzies Research Institute share access to Katabatic every day.

The Altix ICE cluster also boasts over 70TB of disk space, and over 500TB of mirrored tape storage. More on SGI’s press release here.

Related Posts:

• Institute of Cancer Research deploys an SGI Altix UV super
• Time lapse supercomputer installation
• SGI Altix Systems Make Giant Leap to 21 Terabytes of Globally Addressable Memory at Customer Sites
• Silicon Graphics Deploys Ireland’s Fastest Supercomputer in Just One Day
• Too little, too late – Tukwila Itanium is released

SGI have been the first to announced that they will happily cover Verari customer’s support deals – from the press release:

In an effort to provide Verari customers confidence in their business continuity and an ability to map their technology futures, SGI is now adding Verari Systems to our multi-vendor service offerings for both Customer Service and Professional Service,” said David Yoffie, senior vice president of services at SGI. “Verari global customers will now benefit from our worldwide service infrastructure and our experience supporting existing Verari customers in Europe. Customers will be able to work with SGI to define custom support solutions that address their specific needs.

Back in 2008 Verari did a deal with SGI, allowing SGI to provide support to Verari customers throughout the EMEA region. Looks like with the current uncertainty around the company, SGI are nicely positioned to step in and take over all support commitments.

Related Posts:

• Too little, too late – Tukwila Itanium is released
• Cyclone – SGI’s Technical Compute Cloud
• SGI reports Q2 financial results
• Institute of Cancer Research deploys an SGI Altix UV super
• SGI launches global Channel Network Partner program

As with the previous Origin and Altix machines, the Altix UV is available in two models. The Altix UV 100 is the familiar 3u ‘building block’ system, allowing you to scale up as needed. Altix UV 100 scales to 96 sockets (768 cores) and 6TB of shared memory in two racks for up to a claimed 7.0 Tflops of performance.

Altix UV 1000 is the big daddy, scaling up to 256 sockets (giving 2,048 processor cores) and 16TB of shared memory in four racks, for up to a claimed 18.6 Tflops of performance. Interestingly, the 16TB memory limit is imposed by the Nehalem EX architecture.

The next generation of NUMAlink offers a staggering 15 GB/sec transfer rate. The new hub chip has been designed to offload MPI communication. Instead of the CPUs having to handle the packaging and transmission of MPI messages, the UV hub now takes that load. This clears the CPUs to do pure number crunching, but still enabling the level of fast MPI communications that’s needed in such a large NUMA system.

Speaking of large systems, the UV design allows individual 4 rack systems to be hooked together in an 8×8 torus. The theoretical limit of the UV hub could provision over 32,000 cores. The UV hub also has some FB-DIMMs to cache directory information, which not only speeds up operations but also helps with the scalability of the solution.

The design of the processor board is interesting. SGI have used Intel’s Boxboro chipset to handle I/O, with the UV hub plugged directly into both Nehalem CPUs via the QPI interconnect.

The I/O risers mean that, since it’s a single system image, any processor core can access any I/O device anywhere in the system. With the potential for so much I/O throughput, it would be interesting to see what a large Altix UV system packed with Tesla GPUs could achieve.

The Altix UV is an evolution, rather than an evolution, of the flexible NUMA design that first appeared in the Origin 3000. Despite all the press about clusters, big single system image machines still remain the most efficient for many problems. The problems that needed solutions like the original Origin 2000 – pre- and post-processing tasks, very large data problems, I/O and memory intensive apps – have, if anything, gotten more complex and demanding over time, and SGI still have the technology to solve them.

The Nehalem EX won’t be formally launched by Intel until Q2 2010, so SGI aren’t releasing any performance figures. However SGI have announced four initial customers, who will be taking delivering once the processors start volume shipment.

The customers announced at launch are the University of Tennessee (1024 cores, 4TB memory), the North German Supercomputing Alliance (HLRN) (two systems totalling 4352 cores, 18TB of memory, to plug into their existing ICE installation), CALcul en MIdi-Pyrénées/Computations in Midi-Pyrénées (CALMIP) based at the University of Toulouse in France (128 cores and 1 TB of memory), and the Institute of Low Temperature Science at Hokkaido University in Japan (180 cores, 360 GB of memory).

With the Altix UV no longer requiring customers to recompile for Itanium, SGI now have a real chance to push these machines – not just for HPC, but also in business data centres, where Sun and HP have been very successful selling large machines like the F25k and Superdome.

Related Posts:

• Too little, too late – Tukwila Itanium is released
• Cyclone – SGI’s Technical Compute Cloud
• Institute of Cancer Research deploys an SGI Altix UV super
• University of Tasmania’s new SGI Altix ICE cluster for climate modelling
• SGI at SC09

There’ll be the usual pimping of the latest lines from their product range:

Octane™ III, SGI’s personal supercomputer, ICE Cube™ modular data center, CloudRack™ scalable workgroup clusters, SGI® Altix® ICE departmental server, and SGI® InfiniteStorage hardware and software products.

I’m hoping the new shiny bit of kit is going to be a line of Xeon based Altix gear, but we shall see:

“Supercomputing 2009 is the preeminent conference for leading HPC companies to showcase their most innovative technologies,” said Mark J. Barrenechea, president and CEO of SGI. “SGI is proud to demonstrate influential HPC products that scale from the personal supercomputer to the largest scale-up platform, and to make a major product announcement.”

New toys aside, SGI’s CTO Dr. Eng Lim Goh is going to be giving a number of talks, which are always worth a listen. He’ll be presenting “Scalable Architecture for the Many-Core and Exascale Era” at the Exhibitor Speaker Forum on Tuesday, November 17, at 2:30 p.m. PST in room E143-144. He’ll also be talking about scaling up systems using the Nehalem EX in the Intel Theater within the Intel on Wednesday, November 18, at 4:00 p.m. PST.

Once again this year work has gotten in the way and I won’t be able to attend, but I highly recommend you keep on top of things with John’s coverage of SC09 over at insideHPC.

Related Posts:

• Cyclone – SGI’s Technical Compute Cloud
• Institute of Cancer Research deploys an SGI Altix UV super
• University of Tasmania’s new SGI Altix ICE cluster for climate modelling
• SGI launches Altix UV
• Project Ultraviolet and the future of Itanium Altix

The public is invited to listen to a live web cast of the call on the Investor
Relations section of the Company’s website at investors.sgi.com. A replay of the
web cast will be available approximately two hours after the conclusion of the
call and will remain available until the next earnings call. An audio replay of
the conference call will also be made available approximately two hours after
the conclusion of the call. The audio replay will remain available for five days
and can be accessed by dialing 719-457-0820 or 888-203-1112 and entering the
confirmation code: 9725418.

This promises to be an interesting event, giving us a chance to see how things have developed since Rackable took over the bankrupt remains of Silicon Graphics earlier this year.

Related Posts:

• Silicon Graphics is back on the NASDAQ
• Going, going, gone! Silicon Graphics sold for $25m
• SGI have terminated the entire graphics division
• Project Ultraviolet and the future of Itanium Altix
• SGI Intros x86 Servers with QDR InfiniBand