SGI has a new refrigerator-sized Linux server that uses up to 64 Itanium processors. Called the Altix 3000, it’s a Linux adaptation of the Origin 3000. Its most interesting capability is the ability to cluster several Altix 3000s together, with the architecture supporting up to 2,048 processors. Read more about it at ZDNet.
Thats quite fast!!
Is there any other similar project that doesn’t use RedHat distro?
Keep in mind that there aren’t many distros that run on IA-64 as far as I know: Red Hat, SuSE, Debian… and that may be it. In any case, everything is highly customized on this system and as you can imagine it’s not completely fair to ask SGI to develop on so many different distributions.
About a dozen companies worldwide.
What helpful news.
are there any other unices that run on IA-64?
As far as I know, HP-sUX is out for IA64, I think IBM also came out with AIX 5L for Itanium (at least they anounced it a while back), and even SUN was considering portin Slowlaris to it.
I know it is not UNIX, but OpenVMS is also going to be ported to IA64, since Alpha is pretty much EOLed….
It would be interesting to see what would happen if a few more people had a little bit more vision into the future.
I seem to recall the days when *any* computer was useful for just a few companies.
I would guess that multi-way processing will shrink in terms of size and power requirements. We already do this kind of thing with our brains (though some people don’t make much use of theirs…)
This kind of thing looks like a technology to watch. I’m pleased that Linux was the first OS mentioned for it.
Well it is just another instance of SGI’s cc-NUMA, which has been out for almost a decade, they were using MIPS/IRIX but now they have extended for IA64/Linux. So Linux is not the first OS, for it. As far as I know Linux still can not scale with the same efficiency as IRIX for single image systems with more than 64 Procs.
Still it is a hella cool system, hopefully this can bring some customers over to SGI. 🙂
And I agree with you, just because you can not run it at home and play quake on it, or overclock it… doesn’t mean it is not useful. Some of us actually need this kind of machine, and no a pile of PC’s will not do :-).
Well, last time it was Windows NT that would save SGI’s ass. As we know, SGI’s buying into the latest fad didn’t really pay, last time. And I believe it will be the same now.
In the end, they’ll quietly crawl back to IRIX and MIPS.