SGI has been quiet as of late, in fact we haven’t heard much since they declared bankruptcy and were bought by Rackable Systems back in April. Apparently since then they’ve been waiting for the dust to settle and release a new workstation, the Octane III supercomputer.
It’s good to hear from SGI. Their new system looks pretty sweet too, with the potential of up to 80 cores, and 1 TB of memory. Of course, this is not meant for the casual user, but rather someone working on high end graphics or animation, just like the old SGI workstations. The bad news is, you’re going to pay for this power. The Octane III starts at the in yo’ face price of $7999, and goes up from there. Admittedly, the system has the computing power of something typically found on a rackmount system, but it’s still pretty impressive.
from the press release:
Supercomputing Gets Personal
Octane III takes high performance computing out of the data center and puts it at the deskside. It combines the immense power and performance capabilities of a high-performance cluster with the portability and usability of a workstation to enable a new era of personal innovation in strategic science, research, development and visualization.In contrast with standard 2P workstations with only eight cores and moderate memory capacity, Octane III’s superior design permits up to 80 high-performance cores and nearly 1TB of memory. Octane III significantly accelerates time-to-results for over 50 HPC applications and supports the latest Intel® processors to capitalize on greater levels of performance, flexibility and scalability. Pre-configured with system software, cluster set up is a breeze.
* Octane™ III Datasheet (PDF 203K)
Plug It In and It Works
Octane III is office ready with a pedestal, one foot by two foot form factor, whisper quiet operation, ease of use features, low maintenance requirements and support for standard office power outlets. A single, conveniently placed button turns it on and off. Octane III enjoys the same cost saving power efficiencies inherent in all SGI Eco-Logical™ compute designs.Easily Configurable for Deskside HPC
Octane III is optimized for your specific, high performance computing requirements and ships as a factory-tested, pre-integrated platform with broad HPC application support and arrives ready for immediate integration for a smooth out-of-the-box experience.