SGI embraces openness

Automotive Design & Production, Feb, 2003 by Gary S. Vasilash

Computer-aided engineering (CAE) operations, like crash simulations, require plenty of computer processing power, and the people from Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI; Mountain View, CA), say they have developed a new family of high-performance servers and superclusters that will be able to handle big models in a way that equipment from other vendors can't. That's because, according to Larry McArthur, SGI's senior director, Manufacturing Industries, the SGI Altix 3000 family is based on:

1. The Linux operating systems

2. Intel Itanium 2 processors.

Linux, of course, is the operating system that is based on Open Source. McArthur emphasizes, "We're keeping the kernel. SGI won't break the model--we're keeping it open source." So in other words, unlike, say, IRIX, SGI's flavor of UNIX, or any other company's implementation of UNIX, for that matter, Linux is Linux. And it's a free OS. And by using an Intel chip rather than a proprietary one, there is a certain level of "openness" here, too.

One of the issues related to Linux has been its scalability from the point of its memory structure. One of the key things that SGI has been able to do is to create global shared memory across cluster nodes. The Altix 3700 has up to 64 processors in a single node (which McArthur notes is well in excess of the eight processors that his competitors are able to offer. At least for now). As a result, large complex models can be handled without performance penalties, This is an advantage over the distributed memory typical of clusters. The result of this is that SGI has created clusters that perform like supercomputers (which operate with global shared memory). In a variety of computer-industry tests (e.g., CD-adapco Group's STAR-CD test suite of application performance and scalability), the Altix 3000 family proved to be dominant vis-a-vis competitive computers). According to McArthur, there's commonly a compromise in performing CAE tasks, as large models are simplified in order to achieve reasonable computer perf ormance. He says that these new systems don't have that kind of requirement, thanks in large part to the fact that SGI, as it isn't behind the operating system or the processor, has been able to concentrate its engineering efforts on optimizing the performance of the systems.

One question, of course, is whether there are applications that will run on the new equipment. Product from companies including ANSYS, Exa, and MSC.Software is available, and more is anticipated to come for compute-intensive CAE.

The entry-level Altix 3000 server starts at $70,176 with four processors and up to 32 GB of memory. A 64-processor system starts at $1, 129, 262.