Intel Developer Forum 2009 – SGI has introduced a “personal” supercomputer capable of accommodating up to 80 high-performance cores and nearly 1TB of memory. According to SGI CEO Mark J. Barrenechea, the Octane III will help enable a “new era” of innovation in strategic science, research, development and visualization.
“This new product takes high-performance computing to a new level by combining the immense power and performance capabilities of a high-performance deskside cluster with the portability and usability of a workstation,” SGI explained in a statement. “The Octane III is uniquely suited for workplace environments and supports a vast range of distributed technical computing applications.”
Richard Dracott of Intel expressed similar sentiments.
“SGI’s Octane III offers a solution for workstation users wanting to reach dramatically higher levels of performance with minimal investment,” said Dracott. “With the support of up to 19 Intel Xeon processors, HPC users looking to enhance their workgroup productivity outside the data center can also utilize the benefits of the Octane III for faster discovery and quicker simulations.”
Octane III – which ships as a pre-integrated platform – provides broad support for a number of HPC applications, including fluid dynamics, quantum mechanics, molecular dynamics, seismic processing, data analytics, rendering, visualization and CAD.
The Octane III has a base price of $8,000 and is available in the following configurations:
- Ten dual-socket, Quad-Core Xeon 5500
- One dual-socket, Quad-Core Xeon 5500 workstation with advanced NVIDIA graphics and/or GP-GPU card support
- Nineteen single-socket, Quad-Core Xeon 3400
- Nineteen single-socket, Dual-Core Atom
