HP, SGI, Cray and Dell Show Off New Systems at Supercomputing 2009

by Jeffrey Burt

HP’s ProLiant BL2x220c G6 puts two two-socket blade servers powered by Intel’s Xeon 5500 Series chips into a single-sized blade compartment. Officials say the system offers 33 percent more memory capacity than the previous generation.

The ProLiant SL165z is the first of HP’s “skinless” servers from its SL series to run on AMD processors, in this case the six-core “Istanbul” Opteron. The systems run in a lightweight rail and tray design, rather than a traditional chassis and rack form factor.

Cray teamed with Dell and Microsoft to offer the CX1-iWS, which is a high-end workstation running Windows 7 integrated with an HPC computer cluster running Windows HPC Server 2008. The system is sold exclusively through Dell.

SGI showed off its highly scalable Altix UV “UltraViolet” system, which will be powered by Intel’s upcoming “Nehalem EX” Xeon chips, which will offer four, six or eight cores. The SGI system can scale from 32 to 2,048 processing cores and support up to 16 terabytes of shared memory.

Appro’s Xtreme-X1 supercomputer now includes the vendor’s ACE (Appro Cluster Engine) management software, which includes new features such as fully stateless compute nodes, dynamic instant provisioning, and support for full installation of Red Hat or CentOS distributions.

Appro demonstrated its HyperGreen integrated clusters, which offer up to 80 GreenBlade nodes, with 640 processing cores per 42U rack. The GreenBlades, which are designed to consume less energy than traditional blades, are powered by AMD’s six-core “Istanbul” Opterons.

The latest edition to its SuperBlade family of blade servers, Super Micro’s TwinBlade offers a new blade system design that doubles the number of dual-socket compute nodes per 7U enclosure from 10 to 20.