SGI Altix 3000 performance lead rolls on with latest spec benchmark results

EDP Weekly's IT Monitor, Sept 1, 2003

Already the World's Fastest, Altix Continues to Dominate Tests of Components

Fortifying its unchallenged performance lead among all competing systems, SGI (NYSE: SGI) has announced that its SGI Altix 3000 servers and superclusters continue to rule industry standard benchmarks. The Linux OS-based Altix 3000 systems recently posted leading results in SPEComp M2001 tests, which measure compute-intensive OpenMP shared-memory parallel workloads similar to those used in demanding scientific and engineering environments.

Based on the latest available results published on http://www.spec.org, SGI Altix once again screams past all other competing 64-processor and 32-processor systems, including systems from HP, Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu Ltd. Instrumental in making these world record results possible were recent enhancements to version 7.1 of the Intel Fortran and C Compilers for Linux.

--64-processor SPECompMpeak2001: Running 64 Intel Itanium 2 processors at 1.5GHz, the SGI Altix scored 35,042--a 44 percent advantage over the closest competitor, a 64-processor HP Superdome on 875MHx PA-RISC, which scored a peak of 24,318. This is also the highest SPECompM2001 result posted to date--higher even than systems running up to 128 processors.

--64-processor SPECompMbase2001: The same 64p SGI Altix system scored 31,726, more than 11 percent faster than the next-fastest Fujitsu Primepower HPC2500 at 1.3GHz, which scored 28,533 in the tests.

--32-processor SPECompMpeak2001: SGI Altix (with 32 Itanium 2 processors at 1.5GHz) delivered a leading score of 25,817, a 71 percent improvement over a 32p HP Superdome on 875MHx PA-RISC scoring 15,025. SGI also easily outpaced, by more than 65 percent, the Sun Fire 6800 running 24, 1.2GHz UltraSPARC III processors and scoring 15,630.

--32-processor SPECompMbase2001: With a score of 24,358, SGI again bested all other systems, including the Fujitsu Primepower HPC2500 at 1.3GHz, which was the next fastest competitor at 22,280.

"With these results, SGI Altix 3000 continues to reign unchallenged as the fastest, most scalable system available for data-intensive scientific, technical and creative environments," said Dave Parry, senior vice president and general manager, Server and Platform Group, SGI. "By focusing on the needs of users in these markets, SGI and the Linux community have worked together to catapult Linux into the once cost-prohibitive realm of supercomputers and superclusters. The result is a family of systems that break performance records again and again, while providing unparalleled price/performance to an ever-growing population of customers."

In January, SGI announced the SGI Altix 3000 family of servers and superclusters, which combine SGI supercomputing architecture with Intel Itanium 2 processors and the Linux operating system. SGI Altix 3000 is recognized as the first Linux cluster that scales up to 64 processors within each node and the first cluster to allow global shared-memory access across nodes. Inspired by the success of the SGI Altix family and the powerful combination of standard Linux running on 64-bit Intel processors, more than 60 high-performance manufacturing, science, energy and environmental applications have been ported by their commercial developers to the 64-bit Linux environment. Over two thirds of these applications have certified and optimized their code for differentiated performance on the Altix platform.

SGI Altix 3000 systems are available today in single-system configurations of 4 to 64 processors, and supercluster configurations of 4 to 128 processors. For customers demanding even larger Altix superclusters, SGI will be supporting configurations of 256 processors in August 2003 and 512 processors in October 2003. SGI also recently announced plans to extend the industry-leading scalability of its SGI Altix 3000 servers to encompass a record 128 processors within a single instance of the Linux operating environment.