SGI have posted details about their new workstation, the Octane III. Although SGI are raiding the ghosts of workstations past for the name, sadly this isn’t heralding a return to MIPS and IRIX goodness.

In fact the Octane III seems to be going for the market created by the Cray CX-1, and the much missed machines from Orion – personal supercomputers.

As with all things from SGI, the first thing to look at is the case design.

Oh dear. Why drag out the good Octane name if you’re going to release a dull grey box? The Cray CX-1 looks like an extra from a sci-fi film – this just looks like a Dell. And – I’m sorry guys – but the new SGI logo makes the baby Jesus cry. It’s just terrible. (Brand New have an excellent deconstruction of the new logo, well worth a read)

Look at the awesome Cray CX-1:

Or SiCortex’s fantastic SC072:

Or the original Silicon Graphics Octane (mine’s still in use, they’re awesome bits of kit):

Inside the case, though, things start to sound a bit better. The machine is available in three different configurations, all of which can run Red Hat or SUSE Linux (which SGI’s excellent ProPack enhancements) or Windows HPC Server 2008:

• 19 Dual-Core Single Socket systems, giving 38 cores and 76GB RAM
• Ten dual-socket quad-core Xeons processor boards, giving 80 cores and 960GB RAM
• A single dual-socket Quad-Core Xeon processor board with 144GB Ram and 7 PCI-Express slots (2 x16, 4 x8, and a x4 for the RAID card)

The last option, the “graphics workstation”, is particularly underwhelming. The motherboard is mounted vertically, so the system essentially becomes the same as any stock, high end desktop.

Worse still, it seems all that NUMA goodness that made Origin 200s, 300s, and the rackmount Tezro such kick arse workstations is missing – sure, you can have 960GB RAM in an Octane III, but it’s not global shared memory. 10 processor boards, each with 96GB of local memory.

It’s a cluster in a box, using GigE or Infiniband (DDR or QDR) as the interconnect. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, except in a configuration like this it gives you zero flexibility. Unless you’ve got a workload that parallelises nicely, you’ll be running into some walls.

The prices start just under $8k for a single Nehalem node with 8 cores, and rises to $53k for 10 nodes, with 80 cores and 240GB of memory (24GB per node). Raid the piggy bank if you want to max out the RAM or have QDR Infiniband as the interconnect.

And here lies the big problem with this system – there’s too much overlap with the recently announced Cloudrack X2 systems. Sure, those require actual racks, and cooling, whereas the Octane III can run from a single 240V socket. (And it’s “whisper quiet”, apparently. Although to be fair, even large jet airliners are “whisper quiet” compared to the original Octane in fastfans mode).

Apart from being able to stick it on your desk, the Octane III just doesn’t seem to have much going for it, compared to the Cloudrack X2 or a decent high-end graphics workstation. The Cray CX-1 makes sense – Cray don’t really do ‘small’ supers, so having a deskside system is a good play – it’s a stepping stone to their bigger systems.

To make this work, SGI will have to sell in volume, and via it’s channel and partners. Can they duplicate Cray’s success with the CX-1? I’m not sure, especially as it’s not immediately obvious who this machine will appeal to. Really, I’d love to see SGI ship some sexy and powerful development and graphics workstations or baby supers, but the Octane III just seems too weak in too many areas.

You can grab full specs and datasheets over at SGI’s Octane III page.

SGI have just posted some pretty decent SPEC benchmarks, and it’s clear that they’re aiming straight for the datacentre, calling out IBM, HP and Sun’s big SSI (Single System Image) machines. The benchmarks posted are for the Altix 4700, and the cynic in me says this is a bit of “rah rah rah” flag waving exercise before we see a Xeon version rolled out.

From the press release:

* SGI is more than five times faster than its next closest SSI competitor in the SPECfp_rate_base2006 floating point performance benchmark. Altix 4700 proved 5.7 times faster than the Sun SPARC Enterprise 9000, its next closest SSI competitor; IBM and HP products trailed further behind.

* SGI performed over four times better in the SPECint_rate_base2006 integer performance benchmark. Altix 4700 proved 4.3 times faster than the Sun product, its next closest SSI competitor.

* SGI outperforms IBM by almost three times in Java performance with SPECjbb2005 benchmark. Altix 4700 is the leader in Java performance as measured by SPECjbb2005, outperforming IBM by 2.8 times.

* SGI has five times higher aggregate memory bandwidth than its next closest competitors. Altix 4700 has the highest aggregate memory bandwidth in the world, five times higher than its next closest competitors, NEC and IBM.

The arguments over how unrealistic and artificial the SPEC benchmarks are will rage forever, but these are some pretty impressive numbers and some pretty bold claims from SGI. You can read the full press release here.

So, what does the ‘G’ in SGI stand for, now? Just returned from holiday to be greeted with the news that SGI have terminated their entire graphics division.

It seems like the entire VUE suite – including PowerVUE, the distributed and accelerated OpenGL rendering system – has been culled, as have all visualisation tools and products.

The VP of the Graphics Division, Bob Pette, has left to join NVidia – reminding me of the initial exodus of talent when that drooling imbecile Rick Belluzo was busy screwing over the Silicon Graphics customer base.

You can read Mark Barrenechea’s take on it over on his CEO blog.

This looks like a complete and total exit from the graphics market, and an ongoing commitment to ship GPU solutions from ATI, NVidia and Intel within their systems.

Randall Hand over at Vizworld has some more in-depth coverage as this unfolded.

John West over at InsideHPC also has a good post highlighting the issues this poses to SGI’s customers. After being told that the new SGI was 100% committed to transparency, and delivering a line of visualisation products, they’re now not acknowledging the layoffs and the technology termination. Where have I seen that sort of behaviour before? Oh yes – when SGI were previously flailing around.

SGI are finally reaping the rewards from years of ignoring the consumer graphics market and the dangers that innovation there could pose to the company. The surprise is not that it happened, but that it took this long.

Sadly Gutted Innovation, anyone?

Those paying attention to Silicon Graphics history will recall Dr. Eng Lim Goh back in 2004 talking about Project Ultraviolet – a supercomputer that used different types of processor types in a single frame. Although the original white paper has vanished from the SGI site, archive.org has a mirror available here.

The idea of HEC Architecture (High Efficiency Computing) and Multi-Paradigm Computing is a good one, and we’ve already been seeing the fruits in that, specifically Altix gear with FPGAs, and the rise of the GPGPU. Is the current Project Ultraviolet the same beast as the one outlined 5+ years ago?

I mentioned back in February the possibility that, with Tukwila delays and Nehalem processors having a NUMA interface, the time was ripe for SGI to put Nehalem Xeons into the Altix.

Now that Rackable have taken over the shell of SGI and have finalised their product offerings, we can see an interesting mix of processing power. Rackable have both Opteron and Xeon in their gear, whereas the (old) SGI had Xeon and Itanium.

With the Nehalem Xeons having the QuickPath interconnect, and Opteron always having had the NUMA HyperTransport, is now the time for Itanium to be shown the door?

HPCWire and InsideHPC (who know their stuff and are well worth a read) seem to think so. Even the eternally inaccurate TPM at The Register is agreeing (top tip, Timothy – NUMAlink is not a ‘cluster’ interconnect).

Xeons and Opterons inside the shared memory Altix make a lot of sense – immediate cost savings, the chips already have NUMA interconnects so not too much engineering required, and an instant boost in apps and developers.

Existing Itanium customers aren’t going to be too happy, but I’d point people at John Mashey’s excellent essay on the design behind the NUMAflex architecture. These machines were designed to be flexible, to swap CPUs without having to swap the frames, I/O subsystems, and everything else, thus protecting the customer’s investment in the technology, and lowering the price (and pain) of upgrades.

SGI CEO Mark Barranechea has re-confirmed the company’s commitment to Itanium on his blog – but with so many existing customers running on Altix gear, it would have been a PR disaster not to.

I think it’s clear that the next Altix cc:NUMA system will be based around Nehalem Xeon processors. The odds are good that we’ll be seeing an Opteron version as well, and it’ll be interesting to see how that stacks up against offerings from Cray.

As for Itanium? I think we will be seeing a Tukwila based Altix next year sometime. After that, I doubt very much we’ll see future Itanium kit from SGI.

Jim Clark is a true entrepreneur. He didn’t get lucky with one company – he’s founded and been involved in a number of successful businesses, a few of which you may even have heard of …..

Jim founded Silicon Graphics based on his pioneering work in computer graphics at Stanford University. After growing Silicon Graphics into a heavyweight that ruled the graphics and effects market, he went on to join Netscape.

The San Jose Mercury News have managed to score an interview with him, and I highly recommend you give it a read. There are very few tech visionaries who can repeat their success, but above and beyond that Jim is a very clever chap with a solid background in engineering.

The vision of Silicon Graphics was certainly mine. I taught the seven other founders computer graphics. The so-called Graphics Library, which now (as the OpenGL) is in practically every computing product on the planet, was the outgrowth of my teaching computer graphics for almost 10 years.

An interesting thing is that Jim is equally candid about what he did wrong as well as what he did right – a good lesson for any of us running our own businesses.

Microsoft was founded the same year as SGI, and they both went public in 1986. I had the experience of my own foolhardy opinion of the PC in those days — that it was a “toy” unworthy of the attention of real computer scientists.