|
+ SILICON GRAPHICS OCTANES FILL OUT MID-RANGE OF NEW LINE
Silicon Graphics Inc was yesterday completed the top-to-bottom
revamp of its product line with the introduction of the new
mid-range Octane workstations. The company also cut the prices
of the Indigo2 Impact 10000 workstations by up to 22% in an
effort to position the line between its entry-level O2 machines
introduced in October and the new Octane models. The new
Octanes share many of their components with the company's new
supercomputing design unveiled in October and have a much
faster and wider bus. While some observers fret that by turning
its back on Windows NT, the company is shutting itself out of
some of the best software developers in the business, Drew
Henry, product line manager of Silicon Graphics' Power Desktop
line, said that with the design used in its O2, Indigo2 and
Octane systems, Silicon Graphics can "sell levels of
performance that are well above levels of performance that
you're going to get out of a Wintel system." The new Octanes
ship at the beginning of March and Silicon Graphics expects
about half its sales to go via third parties. Pricing for the
Octane systems starts at $25,000; the new prices for Indigo2
machines, effective February 1, include up to a 33% reduction
in memory and storage upgrade prices, cut the price of its
lower-end Indigo2 Solid Impact by 20% to to $20,000.
|
|
+ SIEMENS NIXDORF TO OFFER CCNUMA RM600E MACHINES
As expected (CI No 3,040), Siemens Nixdorf Infromationssystemes
AG has created a one- to 24-way 200MHz Mips R10000-based Unix
SMP Symmetric Multiprocessing server called the RM600E that
supersedes its own RM600 line and the Nile 100 and 150 Models
from its Pyramid Technology Corp subsidiary, which share the
same central processing unit and subsystem architectures. The
RM600E uses a cache coherent Non Uniform Memory Access
architecture internally, enabling each processor on the
quad-CPU boards to access memory on another board. Although
when it first spoke to our sister publication, Unigram.X, about
its RM600E plans, Siemens Nixdorf said it wouldn't use ccNUMA,
it now says that at that time "we didn't understand our own
NUMA plans."
Building block
The RM600E will be used as the building block for creating
large- scale configurations of clustered SMP systems and mixed
SMP and MPP massively parallel environments. Oracle Parallel
Server will enable eight RM600E nodes to be clustered together
when the servers ship next quarter. By mid-year it will be
possible to link as many as 20 RM600E systems using the
PCI/Scalable Coherent Interconnect chip that Dolphin
Interconnect Solutions A/S is building for it. By June, Siemens
Nixdorf will also offer an interface board enabling RM600E to
be integrated with Reliant Cluster configurations of the R1000
parallel system and current generations of Nile SMP servers in
an arrangement it calls Smile. Smile will be demonstrated at a
show in Siemens NIxdorf's hometown of Paderborn, Germany, on
February 17. Siemens Nixdorf has created a dual-bus
architecture in RM600E and enhanced its Reliant Unix operating
system to support ccNUMA, which means previous RM600 and Nile
systems are not upgradable to the new server. Existing ap
plications will run, but to take advantage of ccNUMA
performance improvements of at least 45% they must be
recompiled for the new architecture. A new implementation of
the Synchronous Pipeline SPbus connects the quad boards and
drives data through the system at a sustained 1.2Gbps. A new
CPbus connects the processors on each board to their shared RAM
and interface controllers. Each board accommodates up to four
R10000s and 1Gb RAM, up to six boards can be fitted in a single
system. Later this year, Siemens Nixdorf will introduce a
version of its Reliant Unix V5.44 fitted with the 64-bit
'Aspen' extensions which will support up to 4Gb RAM per board.
Reliant Unix V5.44 is almost equivalent in functionality to
SVR4.2MP and Santa Cruz Operation Inc's UnixWare, but not
quite. Siemens Nixdorf estimated that the RM600E will do 19,000
transactions per minute. The RM600E comes in two models. The
E20 with up to eight CPUs starts at $75,000 as a uniprocessor
with up to 2Gb RAM and 1Tb disk. The 24-way E60 starts at $225
,000 with two R10000s, up to 4Gb RAM and 3Tb disk. Siemens
Nixdorf expects to skip the 275MHz R10000 and move to the
300MHz later this year. The RM2000 due later this year will
enable Reliant Clusters to be linked with Tandem Computer Inc's
Intel-based ServerNet interconnect systems running NT. The two
are fusing clustering software and developing hardware
interconnections.
|