SGI Announces AMD Support for Altix® ICE Supercomputers

SGI (NASDAQ: SGI), a trusted leader in technical computing, today announced immediate support for AMD Opteron™ 6100 series processors for the SGI® Altix® ICE 8400, the next generation of the award-winning Altix ICE scale-out high performance computing (HPC) blade platform. By combining AMD’s powerful and efficient architecture with the Altix ICE 8400’s unique board and interconnect design, SGI delivers breakthrough performance and compute efficiency.

A number of SGI Altix ICE systems are already delivering real-world performance with several prominent and meaningful world record SPEC benchmarks across all major HPC industry sectors. More than 35 top-tier universities, 30 national and regional labs, and 10 automotive companies have already adopted and deployed the SGI Altix ICE platform to increase their productivity, reduce risk, and to accelerate their results or time to market.

With AMD Opteron 6100 series processor support, the Altix ICE 8400 is now capable of delivering up to 1,536 processor cores in a single rack, and can seamlessly scale from 32 to 65,536 compute nodes. Additionally, the Altix ICE 8400 now provides up to 14.13 teraflops of compute capability and up to 8.192 terabytes of memory per rack.

"SGI is committed to delivering the fastest and most scalable compute cluster platforms possible with Altix ICE solutions,” said Mark J. Barrenechea, SGI CEO. "This is a long-term partnership to incorporate scalable AMD technologies into the SGI product lines.”

Altix ICE 8400, with its innovative blade design, easily and affordably scales 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®, Red Hat® or CentOS Linux® operating systems. The SGI Altix ICE 8400 will be on display in AMD booth #3119 at Supercomputing 2010 in New Orleans from November 15-18, 2010.

"This next-generation of Altix ICE servers further extends AMD and SGI’s performance leadership for HPC environments,” said Patrick Patla, vice president and general manager, Server Division, AMD. "Altix ICE 8400 leverages the outstanding performance and efficiency of the AMD Opteron 6100 series processors to enable large scale-out HPC cluster deployments for the world’s leading supercomputing centers.”

The SGI Altix ICE 8400 provides unprecedented real-world scalability and breakthrough performance across a variety of HPC applications, including, but not limited to, CAE and CFD, computational chemistry, molecular modeling, reservoir simulation, seismic imaging, weather forecasting, and defense and intelligence applications. This highly configurable system’s unparalleled performance, coupled with its unmatched reliability, availability and serviceability, helps scientists and engineers solve the world's most complex computational problems.

"We look forward to using SGI’s new AMD technology-based ICE system," said Professor Edmo Campos with the Ocean Numerical Modeling Laboratory (LABMOM) of the Oceanographic Institute of the University of São Paulo (IOUSP). "Research proves that the upper layers of the subtropical South Atlantic have become warmer and saltier over the past 50 years, and we need a system that we trust as we conduct important scientific research to enhance our understanding of the causes and impacts of the changes occurring on the regional climate.”

Four Altix ICE Blade Enclosure Models

Altix ICE hardware architecture is based on a cabinet-level design comprised of up to four 10U blade enclosures with 16 compute blades per enclosure, plus several options for integrated QDR switches. Altix ICE supports hypercube, enhanced hypercube, all-to-all and fat-tree topologies, enabling Altix ICE deployment to be customized and configured to ensure that it exactly matches end-user requirements.

Two New Altix ICE 8400 Blade Models

The blade models below offer differentiated Quad Data Rate (QDR) networking options.

• IP106 — offers dual AMD Opteron 6100 processors with dual QDR InfiniBand connectivity for dual plane configurations in the Altix ICE 8400EX enclosure via two single port Mellanox® ConnectX-2 chipsets for maximum, non-blocking performance.
• IP110 — offers dual AMD Opteron 6100 processors with dual QDR InfiniBand connectivity for dual plane configurations in the Altix ICE 8400EX enclosure via a single dual-port Mellanox® ConnectX-2 chipset for compelling price/performance benefits.

Availability and Pricing

Altix ICE 8400EX and 8400LX enclosures and IP106 and IP110 blade models with AMD® Opteron™ 6100 series processors are available immediately. Altix ICE family pricing can be provided upon request. For more information, please visit www.sgi.com/AltixICE.

Note to editors

High-resolution photos of the Altix ICE 8400 are available for download at www.sgi.com/media.

About SGI

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© 2010 SGI. SGI and Altix are registered trademarks or trademarks of Silicon Graphics International Corp. or its subsidiaries in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective holders.

This news release contains forward-looking statements regarding SGI technologies and third-party technologies that are subject to risks and uncertainties. These risks and uncertainties could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in such statements. The reader is cautioned not to rely unduly on these forward-looking statements, which are not a guarantee of future or current performance. Such risks and uncertainties include long-term program commitments, the performance of third parties, the sustained performance of current and future products, financing risks, the ability to integrate and support a complex technology solution involving multiple providers and users, and other risks detailed from time to time in the company's most recent SEC reports, including its reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q.