SGI® InfiniteStorage 4000

Thinking ever bigger and bigger, Silicon Graphics representatives were ecstatic to announce the SGI® InfiniteStorage 4000, the industry’s first 4-gigabit Fiber Channel-based storage system designed for the mid-range market: “SGI delivered 4Gb storage to the market before anyone else and has a strong history of delivering reliable high performance,” stated SGI storage group director John Howarth. The SGI InfiniteStorage 4000 delivers a platform that is fifty-four percent denser than previous storage systems and can be seamlessly upgraded to an enterprise-class SGI InfiniteStorage 4500 with data in place.

The new 4GB Fiber Channel enclosures can also be added to most SGI legacy systems to extend the value of past investments still in production. The SGI InfiniteStorage 4000 is the newest addition to the SGI InfiniteStorage storage technology product line. Promising to deliver cost-effective, scalable storage, the SGI InfiniteStorage 4000 features a combination of capacity and adaptable performance that will help IT organizations meet future needs of technical computing and business applications. For businesses with CRM databases, the SGI InfiniteStorage 4000 can be configured with features; Fiber Channel and SATA drives may be intermixed to maximize performance and minimize costs as well. SGI InfiniteStorage 4000 is designed for IT organizations to balance capacity and performance needs.

For technical environments that require the movement of large amounts of data, the SGI InfiniteStorage 4000 can be used as price/performance storage for streaming data. As a repository for reference data or as a second tier in a data lifecycle management hierarchy the SGI InfiniteStorage 4000 can serve as large capacity storage, scaling up to 56TB in a single system. And for something completely different, SGI gained notoriety that could soon be reflected in share value, as their Altix system “spawned” the first-ever simulation of a functioning organism. Taking place under the auspices of Dr. Klaus Schulten, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a plant virus of one million or so moving atoms was simulated. SGI got its Altix 3700 Bx2 system into the record books with sheer speed: Some estimates claimed that, using traditional methods and contemporary technology, the result achieved yesterday might have had to wait thirty-five more years.

The Altix system allowed calculations of atom movement in temporal units called femtoseconds, or one one-millionth of one-billionth – 0.000000000001– of a second. The project is the first successful case of biological reverse-engineering of a complete virus. “This is on the highest end of what is feasible today,” said Schulten. The smallest natural organisms known, viruses contain intricate mechanisms for infecting host cells. The Illinois researchers simulated one of the tiniest and most primitive viruses in an attempt to recreate the process of infection and propagation, with the ultimate goal of creating medicines and adding to the bank of knowledge on viral activity. In this case, the activity of the viral organism was simulated for about 50 nanoseconds; the researchers were able to determine that the virus, which appears symmetrical, actually pulses in and out in an asymmetrical pattern.

The Altix family leverages the built-in SGI® NUMAlink™ interconnect fabric, which allows global addressing of all memory in the system and delivers data up to 200 times faster than conventional interconnects. For the first time, more complex data sets and complete workflows can be driven entirely out of memory, enabling productivity breakthroughs that traditional Linux clusters or repurposed UNIX servers can’t achieve. Altix systems offer breakthrough flexibility and configurability, scaling to up to 512 processors per node. Based on a 64-bit Linux operating environment, the Altix family is uniquely capable of independently scaling processors, shared memory and/or I/O on a single, standard chassis with different expansion modules, providing optimal resource usage for demanding technical applications.