SGI Announces New Altix XE Server and Cluster

High performance server and storage solutions maker SGI has said that it will deliver the new SGI Altix XE310 server and XE1300 cluster within this quarter.

Announced last year at Supercomputing 2006, the Altix XE310 server features the "Atoka" motherboard design which SGI has developed jointly with Intel. The new Atoka board allows the Altix XE310 server to accommodate up to four Quad Core Intel Xeon processor 5300 series into a single 1U chassis.

The Altix XE1300 cluster combines multiple XE310 compute nodes with an Altix XE240 head node in a preconfigured, ultra-dense package for system heavy applications.

According to SGI, Altix XE1300 clusters and Altix XE310 servers deliver a lower overall net cost per core, extremely high floating-point performance in every rack, superior performance per square foot, and leading power efficiency.

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SGI Altix XE runs industry-standard Linux operating systems and comes with a choice of Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server or Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In addition to this, the SGI ProPack 5 for Linux OS option includes resource management tools and enhanced development libraries like Flexible File Input/Output (FFIO) which provides programmers with fine-grained control of I/O transfers to maximize performance.

Though SGI did not reveal the prices for the Altix XE 1300 line, it said that the Altix XE310 servers featuring four Intel Xeon processor sockets per 1U chassis will be available at a price lower than $3,100.

SGI expects to begin shipping Altix XE1300 clusters and XE310 servers in March.