I mentioned in a previous post the press release covering the Silicon Graphics Altix installed at the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC)

Well, SGI have put up a great video, showing the timelapse installation that took only 3 hours. The entire system was powered up in a day – madness!

Slide on over to http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2009/february/ichec_video.html and check it out.

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Feb. 10 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) (Nasdaq: SGIC) is in a category all by itself when it comes to massive globally shared main memory and globally addressable memory on SGI(R) Altix(R) 4700 systems. With numerous installations in the 4 TB range, and a number more in the 8 TB range, the groundbreaking scalability of SGI systems extends to 21 TB of globally addressable main memory at customer sites. This is over five times the size of memory that other vendors can offer today. The system is designed to accommodate 128 terabytes of globally shared memory under the control of a single instance of the Linux operating system! The system may also be partitioned among multiple instances of Linux and provide globally addressable shared memory among OS instances via SGI’s unique NUMAlink(R) interconnect technology.

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Russia’s Federal Service for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring (Roshydromet) after a thorough evaluation and rigorous procurement procedure has deployed Silicon Graphics solutions to rapidly develop detailed models that enable more precise weather forecasts. The systems operate at 27 trillion operations per second, providing 10,000 times the computational power of Roshydromet’s previous Cray supercomputer. This enhanced capability has expanded both the forecast duration and the accuracy of these critical forecasts.

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Ireland’s most powerful computer was installed in three hours and powered up in just one day, thanks to a rapidly deployable computing platform from Silicon Graphics,Inc.(SGI) (NASDAQ: SGIC) that is transforming what users can expect from supercomputer deployments.

Installed in November at the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC), “Stokes,” a new SGI® Altix® ICE 8200 system that operates at up to 25.1 trillion operations per second, is rankedNo.117 on the Top500 list of the world’s fastest computers. Perhaps more significantly, the latest ICHEC supercomputer delivers 87.6 percent of its peak performance when running the LINPACK benchmark — the best efficiency of any industry-standard system appearing in the list’s top 225 systems. This remains a serious factor for scientific and engineering institutes that use MPI and seek to minimize run times, processor counts and power use while maximizing job throughput.

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It looks like Intel will be pushing the next version of Itanium, Tukwila, out the door in the second half of this year. Issues with DDR3 look like they’re resolved, so it looks like a firm date.

But the usual Itanium suspects – SGI and HP – are strangely quiet. Silicon Graphics in particular use Itanium in big boxes – we’re not talking off the shelf kit here, they have a long lead time and the sales process is equally long. So it would make sense for SGI to be talking to customers now about Tukwila equipped Altix 4700s – 6 or 8 cores on a 1024 processor machine is serious bragging rights.

This raises the interesting possibility that Silicon Graphics will be (finally) dropping Itanium, and instead going for Nehalem Xeons in the big Altix gear, utilising their nifty Quick Path Interconnect.

With all the financial woe going on, this would make serious cost savings for Silicon Graphics – I think we’ll be seeing some interesting product announcements this year.