Altix
by John Ehrlinger, 12 July 2006
Introducing our newest computer, the Altix 350!
Through the AFIC grant, we've expanded our computational resources dramatically. Installed in the Cleveland Clinic Data Center at the Parker building, the Altix 350 is classified as a supercomputer. The system employs a scalable design that can grow to 32 processors and 384GB of memory per system
The Altix 350 is manufactured by Silicon Graphics Inc (SGI), you can see their website for more general product information:
http://www.sgi.com/products/servers/altix/350/
Take a Look inside!
For our Altix 350 we have installed four compute "bricks". Each brick containing a pair of Intel Itanium2 processors running at a clockspeed of 1.6GHz. We've also installed a total of 96GB of RAM. The Altix computer line is different from a standard compute cluster, since each processor has access to all 96GB of memory.
Since we are a data centric department, and all of the work we do has to do with data, we've also turned this system into a high speed database machine. We've installed an SGI® InfiniteStorage S330 disk. This gives us 1.9 Terabytes of RAID 5 disk storage. The system is now half populated, but can grow to nearly 16TB of disk storage. The disk is connected to the Altix through a fibre channel interface to allow fast data throughput to the system. http://www.sgi.com/products/storage/tech/s330.html
From the rear, you see that we have plenty of growth space within the system rack. The large white cables visible are the SGI NumaLink cables that tie the 4 Altix bricks into one large compute unit. The thin blue cables are fibre channel cabling for the S330 disk unit.
Closed up for a clean package. The system is connected to our intranet with two 1Gig ethernet connections for large data transfers.
The look of the future.