Looking for the world’s biggest PC? This week SGI announced the certification of the SGI Altix UV with Windows Server 2008 R2:
Altix UV can now scale Windows Server technology to record levels,” said SGI CEO Mark J. Barrenechea. “Customers can deploy with confidence their mission-critical software on larger scale hardware platforms supported by Microsoft and SGI with Intel Xeon-based processors. We are continuing our joint development work with Microsoft, and expect to scale Windows Server even further in the very near term.”
Currently, Windows limits the Altix UV 100 to 128 cores of (Intel Xeon 7500) and 1 TB of memory, all in a single system image. While Linux users can scale Altix to 2,048 cores and 16TB of shared memory in four racks, we can expect Windows to double current limits to 256 cores sometime in the next year or so.
Core counts aside, I think what really makes Altix exciting is the large memory. Now that Altix is certified, I’m told that we can expect to see a slew of record Windows Application benchmarks in the near future.
