[geeks] Octane III

[Joshua Boyd]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 09:21:49AM -0400, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
> > Phil Stracchino wrote:
> >> SGI just announced the Octane III "personal supercomputer", with up to
> >> 80 cores and 1TB RAM.
> >>
> >> http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2009/september/octaneIII.html
> >> http://www.sgi.com/products/servers/octaneIII/
> > 
> > Bleh.  It's just a PC cluster in a smallish box.
> 
> looks about the size of it, yeah.  I trust there's actually a center
> backplane between all those node boards so they don't have to be cabled
> together individually...

I wouldn't bet on that.  In the picture of the rear of the machine, I
see a built in switch on the right.

The three configurations are interesting (but perhaps not all in good
ways).  The first is a 10 slot Xeon 5500 system.  The second is a 19
slot Atom system.  The third looks like a plain PC, spec wise.  This
doesn't make tons of sense.  Why can't I have something like a double,
triple, or quad slot graphics machine, then use the other 6-8 slots for
regular Xeon blades, or Atom blades.

A xeon 5500 front end blade (with graphics) and 12 Atom blades would be
cool (but probably not as fast as 6 Xeon blades).  It would be cooler
still if they were putting PCI-E on the Atom blades and giving them
something better than GigE to talk.  That must be possible since Super
Micro is making Atom's with PCI-E 4x slots, which should be about
perfect for IB DDR 4x.  I don't expect actual slots, but for it to all
be build in, which is presumably what they do with the IB option for the
Xeon system.