[FRIAM] NM Free Supercomputer

[Douglas Roberts]

Marcus,

The story I got a few of years ago when SGI was just about to come out with
the Altix 3000 was that SGI had decided early on to adopt the Itantium 64
processor.  This info was presented to us by one of the members of the Altix
development team, back in early 2005, I believe.  We were told that there
was a lot of tuning and tie ins to processor channels that were required to
make optimum use of the Itanium with their NUMA architecture.
Unfortunately,  this was (just) before AMD came out with the Opteron 64.
SGI's timing was just a bit off, as usual.  Had they been just a bit later
to market with the Altix, they might well be running AMD 64-bit processors
today instead of the dead-end IA-64.  As it was, SGI brought the Altix (neat
machine, btw) to market just as industry was adopting the Opteron in
preference to Itanium for 64-bit computing.

I am not aware of any obligations that SGI has for using Itanium processors
in their systems, however.

--Doug

-- 
Doug Roberts, RTI International
droberts at rti.org
doug at parrot-farm.net
505-455-7333 - Office
505-670-8195 - Cell

On Nov 6, 2007 7:24 AM, Marcus G. Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> wrote:

> Jack Stafurik wrote:
> > NM will have a supercomputer that will be free for in-state residents
> > and businesses. The link below has the details, but to summarize:
> >
> > 1) 3,500 Intel quad-core Xeon processors with 28 terabytes memory
> Huh, I thought SGI was obligated with Intel to use Itanium in all of its
> computers..  (?)
>
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