Evgeny Karadaev, 123rf.com

SGI's Bill Mannel talks about the ICE HPC platform

On ICE

Article from ADMIN 06/2011

By Joe Casad

ADMIN editor Joe Casad chats with Bill Mannel, SGI's Vice President for Server Marketing, on the latest release of SGI's Altix ICE high performance computing platform.

Joe Casad: It looks like SGI has some exciting stuff coming up. What's coming with your next release of the Altix ICE HPC platform?

Bill Mannel: We're actually going to be announcing the latest generation of ICE – that's actually the fifth generation of the product. We basically went all the way back to first principles and looked at all the base installations we've done, all the customer feedback and field feedback we had, the wins and losses, and we essentially built it from scratch, although we did stay with some of the founding principles of the product, such as highest-performance weight architecture for HPC applications, flexibility for addressing a lot of different types of applications, and also keeping the customer satisfaction to the maximum. A recent survey found that this platform actually warrants our top customer satisfaction of any of our platforms, so we didn't want to do anything that would jeopardize that.

Based on the original ICE, we had both air cooling and water-cooled doors capability, and we're actually adding additional cooling capability as well. So, besides those two – air cooling and water-cooled doors – we also have the capability to put a cold sink directly on the processors themselves to take away the heat; we added warm water cooling as well, and the ability to use a contained hot aisle arrangement, as well as the standard front-to-back air flow arrangement.

We've got a couple different racking schemes. One is standard 19-inch, which is actually an improvement, because the current ICE is a 24-inch rack, which in some cases is somewhat problematic. In some installations, we actually had to put the enclosure on its side and plug it in and reduce some density, but with the new platform, we can get increased density in a standard 19-inch rack without having to do that. Also, we have this large, we call it a cell, which basically allows us to collapse a

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