back to article HPE teases HPC punters with scalable gear

The first fruit of Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s buy of SGI is set to hit the streets in July with the release of a high performance system - the HPE SGI 8600. The system is a liquid cooled petascale box assembled on legacy SGI ICE AXA architecture, and is aimed squarely at punters involved with beefy scientific and engineering …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    This destroys anything IBM and Lenovo can or will ever come up with. Look for IBM/Lenovo customers to bail, especially considering that there's hardly anyone left to provide Server Hardware Support.

    1. Alan Brown Silver badge

      "This destroys anything IBM and Lenovo can or will ever come up with. "

      Only if you don't take HP's history of fucking things up into account.

  2. Nate Amsden

    10k nodes and no extra switches

    That is quite a lot of ports! Looks like the architecture is 4 blade enclosures per rack (36 blades), and they have racks for I/O too so maybe big aggregation switches in those. Maybe 300 or so racks for a maxed out system.

    1. HPCJohn

      Re: 10k nodes and no extra switches

      Nate,

      the ICE Infiniband network architecture is that there are blade enclosures per rack.

      I thought there were 8 in an ICEX (there are four in an ICE).

      the blade enclosures have two or four (for dual rail) dumb Mellanox sswitch blades, as you say.

      The switch blades are connected in a hyperbube topology.

      there are no big aggregator switches.

      Seriously though - when you expand an SGI system like that, someone at the factory runs a program, and the installation engineers come along with extra cables and a plug list of how to hook them up.

      On the cluster intself there is a nifty utility to check the topology of the connections.

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