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Since when has 20k at the entry price point been for the Masses?

... wow my mom and dad will be so pleased that they can now have their supercomputer for only 7 grand per 1U unit... they're practically GIVING them away.

I wonder how long it is going to take Intel to completely fold Itanic... I give it another 3 years before Intel burns through another $2Bn in wasted investment on Itanic and completely pulls the plug. It is going to be interesting what happens to SGI then. If I were making decisions at SGI, I would be seriously considering Opteron now.

Supercomputing with regular off the shelf commodity chips is real wasteful.

We need to use streaming processors for alot of projects. They are more efficient.

http://merrimac.stanford.edu/

I do like itanium though.

Too expensive and running on dead end intel cpus. They feel the squeeze from the desktop sector so they must lower prices on their hw and they make it then look like they're doing us a favor by dropping prices on their crap hw. You can probably build a rack server from desktop computers and use some linux sw to run it at fraction of the cost and faster.

For that kind of hardware, the price really is a bargain. I believe that Sun is offering competitive hardware with slightly better prices, but I´m not sure. And to anyone who thinks that one could build a rack of off-shelves desktop parts and just throw Linux at it (let´s pretend that those 1U small factor mobos and cases are commodities), I have a quick question. Have you EVER stepped on a Data Center? :-)

I, being an avid Linux user, agree that Linux plays a big part on the performance of these SGI offerings, but puhleese...

However, like some posters already pointed out, I´d keep both eyes on Intel´s roadmap for Itanium since they aren´t exactly best sellers and everybody and their mothers knows that Intel already spent a lot of money in this. Even HP, Intel´s partner on R&D for the Itanium, already jumped off the wagon.

It would be wise if SGI started to evaluate AMD offerings for its Altix product lines just as a fail safe (or even consider completely replace Intel´s processors with AMD ones since Intel has been playing catch-up to AMD for quite some time).

I wonder if only Linux can be used on this hardware... What about FreeBSD?

This is what SGI is really talking about. At the bankruptcy sale, pennies on the dollar, so that will be $70 per 1U supercomputer.

$70 is not a bad deal , all things considered. A decent machine with good FP performance and a museum piece as well. At long last, SGI figured out how to offer hardware at a good price. Hurrah.

Damn. Itanic CPUs in a 1U configuration. Talk about thermal challenges. With a TDP of 100W+ SGI must have som serious cooling i those pizzaboxes.

Since when has 20k at the entry price point been for the Masses?

Depends on what you get and what you can use it for.

Itanium gets a LOT of flak, some of which is deserved, some of which is not.

As it stands, Altix is INCREDIBLY scalable - it beats hybrid-cluster systems such as the Cray XD1 or commodity x86/Myrinet clusters into dirt for almost linear scaling with cpu/job size.

However, the two big issues with itanium are compilers and proce. When we had an Itanium2 system to test, the version of ICC at the time realy struggled in some cases - sometimes the output codes were blazing fast, sometimes they were rubbish compared to a P3 of the same clock speed. When you consider what you can buy for your money, Itanium is simply too risky for uncertain performance characteristics - £20 buys you a 16-core opteron machine, which is more "conventional" to work with, and easier to get reasonablew performance from.

Is ICC better now? probably. But that's no guarantee, and a smart cluster admin, is going to think twice about sinking a lot of money into Altix.

The masses aren't interested in supercomputing. They are mostly interested in why the new version Freecell doesn't have their favorite deck of cards.

care to elaborate how hp jumped off the bandwagon?

hp is still moving enterprise unix (a big business for them) from pa-risc to itanium...I see no other processor anywhere on the horizon.

http://www.primidi.com/2003/12/01.html

a little on streaming processor for supercomputers.

Now they've corrected their prices, could this mean SGI will eventually become relevant again, and that I should buy their stock which is at a record low?

That looks interesting. If chipbuilding didn't cost a damn lot of money and expertise..

I would like to see AMD go at it
It's true that modern processors are extremely wasteful of processor cycles.