While SGI’s Irix architecture is getting a bit long in the tooth, its high-end Linux solutions are selling well into the upstream, as witnessed by Abu Dhabi National Oil Company’s (ADNOC) acquisition of a 64 processor Altix Bx2. Unlike conventional Linux clusters, the Altix offers a single image of the Linux operating system, a window onto its massive 128GB of SGI’s NumaFlex shared memory.
Eclipse
This high-end configuration is specially suited to reservoir simulation applications such as Schlumberger’s Eclipse, the target application for ADNOC’s new toy. Shared memory enhances memory read/write bandwidth and eases the programming task of writing to multi-CPU nodes. The Altix is capable of scaling to 512 Itanium 2 nodes and 6 Terabytes of shared memory.
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