SGI Announces Enhancements to Altix ICE Blade Platform

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SGI has just announced several enhancements to their Altix ICE blade platform. The largest of which include the addition of a new blade enclosure and new blade options. The latest blade option integrates the Intel 5400 chipset [Seaburg], the first blade on the market to do so.

SGI logoToday’s announcement shows that SGI Altix ICE is rapidly maturing as a platform for HPC,” said Bill Mannel, senior director, SGI server marketing. “These latest enhancements to Altix ICE allow organizations to deploy solutions that are flexible enough to adapt to their workflows and budgets while maximizing performance and productivity. And with the Altix ICE platform enabling even large-scale systems to get up and running quickly, SGI can deliver those advantages faster so customers can realize a return on their investments sooner.”

The more interesting of the announcements [for you hardware nuts] is centered around the Infiniband fabric. The ICE platform now has the option of a dual-plane Infiniband network with included dual-rail compatible MPI libraries. They also have the option of configuring the Infiniband network fabric as a hypercube [as opposed to a fat tree] for systems with larger node counts.

SGI rounds out the enhancement lists with upgrades to their Tempo cluster management tool and the availability of ProPack 5 for the ICE platform.

For more details, read the full post here.