by Steven Witucki, assistant editor
San Diego, CALIF. — In a recent interview, Fabio Gallo, EMEA Director of Super Computing and Servers at SGI, said that SGI’s NUMAflex technology is going to be their technology of choice for the forseeable future. “NUMAflex architecture is going to be the base of our future systems”, he said.
NUMAflex modular technology is described as a “brick”-style system for constructing small to very large systems from a common set of building blocks. The SGI NUMAflex system allows users to build their optimum configuration one component at a time and adopt new technologies that meet their specific needs.
“Our competitors are taking their first steps into this type of architecture, and we’re already on our third generation,” said Gallo. “We already have 512-processor or even 1064-processor systems in the backlog. We’ve sold over 30,000 systems with that architecture. We’ve already had several years of research & development. We definitely have plans for future announcements.”
Gallo also said that the NUMAflex technology would be ready for Linux. “Our assumption is that Linux is going to make big inroads in the technical computing marketplace,” he said. “It is growing very fast, and based upon our experience both in the Origin family and also on the T3 – remember that a big part of the T3 development team was SGI – we essentially learned a lot from both platforms, and we’re ready to roll out a Linux-based supercomputer.”
“In Europe, especially in the academic and research community, we had a very large number of orders. Some of these have already been made public. In February we announced that the Dutch Supercomputing Center SARA purchased a 1024 processing system. And SARA has an option to grow to a 3 TeraFlops system in 2003.”
“Moving from the first generation to the second generation, we’ve basically doubled the bandwidth in the systems, and you’re going to see more of that moving forward,” said Gallo. “And again, what’s important to remeber with NUMAflex architecture is that as new technology comes in, you can use it in the systems without having to replace the whole system.”
Recently SGI announced that the U.S. Navy’s Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center (FNMOC) purchased two SGI Origin 3000 series systems utilizing SGI NUMAflex technology.
For more information, see http://www.sgi.com
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