SGI continues to invest in MIPS and IRIXHeidelberg 21 jun 2002 Rüdiger Wolff in his talk stressed the importance of the SGI scalable ccNUMA architecture as well as SGI's long-term plans with MIPS and IRIX.
The continued investment in IRIX and MIPS can be explained as follows. IRIX offers unique levels of scalability, industry-leading security, reliability, real time processing, media, and other features. In turn, MIPS provides architectural advances without the cost burden of fabrication.
SGI offers integration and scalability through Interconnect with low latency, high bandwidth, a robust technology for computing, data and visualisation.
The speaker heavily promoted the SGI scalable ccNUMA architecture with 8 GB of physical memory and
18 GB of single shared physical memory. The scalable application performance requires low latencies, high bandwidth, and high bisection bandwidth. The architecture offers unique modular computing with the SGI NUMAflex in terms of performance and flexibility.
As far as the Origin server product line family is concerned, there is a strong focus on price-performance, integrated form-factor, and deployable solutions including clustering with the Origin3000 cluster-configuration.
MIPS processor roadmap looks like this. There is a new processor every 9-12 months. The processor frequency options are always available with SGI.
With regard to bandwidth, the interconnect topology is traditionally hypercube. The bisection bandwidth profile drops with larger number of processors but the NUMA link allows to do better. The "Fat Tree" topology delivers constant bisection.
Mr. Wolff concluded by saying that the NUMA flex ccNuma scales to 1024 p with a single large address space and a single operating system image. The assets are lower latency and higher scalable bisection.
Leslie Versweyveld |
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