SGI today announced the first Rackable x86 scale-out servers to support both on-board Quad Data Rate (QDR) 40Gb InfiniBand and 10Gb Ethernet connections. Available immediately, the new servers also leverage advanced memory capabilities and Intel Xeon 5500 series processors to deliver advanced processing performance for applications that demand higher performance.

Read more at HPCWire.

Silicon Graphics will be have a stand and be showcasing their wares up the upcoming International SuperComputing 09 conference in Hamburg, Germany, at the end of this month.

Along with showing off the 10,000 core ‘Molecule’ concept, Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI’s CTO and all round Very Clever Chap, will be giving a talk on scaling up HPC Architecture to handle multiple core CPUs.

“Scalable HPC Architecture for the Many-Core Era,” presented by Dr. Eng Lim Goh, senior vice president and chief technology officer at SGI.

Date: Thursday, June 25
Time: 10:30 a.m. and 3:15 p.m. CEST
Location: Hall 3, Congress Center Hamburg
Topic: The IT industry has moved from the era of regular clock speed improvements to the new many-core era. This is a fundamental change to which even consumer PC users and applications will need to adapt. This session will focus on the implications for productive high-performance and clustered computing architectures.

One of the problems with Silicon Graphics was that, despite having some really scalable solutions, they never really focussed and sold into corporate data centres. HPC, sure, visualiation, no worries – but all those people buying Sun F15ks who needed big iron for that data warehouse? No chance.

Looks like the Rackable chaps have the right idea, though, and are taking the range of SGI solutions to town:

SGI (R) (NASDAQ:SGI), today announced that Mark Barrenechea, president & CEO, and Jim Wheat, chief financial officer, will participate in the UBS Global Technology and Services Conference in New York on Monday, June 8, 2009. Mark Barrenechea will present on behalf of SGI at 3:45 p.m. Eastern Time.

You can catch the full release here.

It seems that data centres in a box are taking off in a big way, but SGI lead the field purely because they’ve chosen the best name for their offering – behold the ICE Cube.

SGI® (NASDAQ:SGI) announced today that it recently shipped its ICE Cube™ modular data center to i/o Data Centers, a leading colocation and data center services provider based in Phoenix, Arizona, to address i/o clients’ evolving data center needs. The ICE Cube is secured, powered and connected to i/o Data Centers’ network.

The specs are pretty impressive – an ICE Cube can hold up to 2,800 servers, fielding 22,400 cores. Or you can it it out with up to 11 Petabytes of storage.

With the rising cost of deploying data centres, and the increase in hype around cloud computing, we should be seeing a big increase in the deployments of these sorts of solutions.

John West over at insideHPC has landed an exclusive interview with SGI’s CEO, Mark Barrenechea.

The article is a great read, and John gets some good information on the new SGI’s product roadmap, including news that the Silicon Graphics visualisation technology (the impressive VUE suite) still has a future.

Perhaps the best news is that SGI’s plan for an Altix system based on Intel’s Xeon processors, as opposed to Itanium, is still coming down the line. Itanium has always been a step backwards from MIPs, and Xeon beats it hands down in the price/performance stakes, optimised code or no. With SC09 coming up in November could we be seeing a product announcement?

Mark also has a blog over at http://ceoblog.rackable.com/ which is also worth your time. Another big positive for the new company – the CEO is happy to communicate openly on his company’s website, something Silicon Graphics should have paid attention to many years ago.