“Hewlett-Packard Co. and Silicon Graphics Inc. attacked Sun
Microsystems’ entry into heavy-duty compute farm hardware on the
high and low ends, respectively, at the Design Automation
Conference this week. HP rolled out a 20-system compute farm backed
up with a custom-configured rack of Cisco Systems hardware aimed at
the emerging market of application service providers. For its part,
SGI tapped Intel’s Pentium III Xeon processors to launch a smaller
rack-mounted cluster of systems aimed at resource-intensive jobs
like design verification.”
“For its part, SGI hopes to chip away at the lower end of the
compute farm market by offering systems based on the Pentium III
Xeon. SGI showed at DAC its first systems equipped with Xeon, in
this case running at 700 MHz. The systems are built into 4U racks,
each rack including a four-way processor, with a total of nine
systems in a rack. The systems are sold with Windows NT, Windows
2000, Red Hat Linux 6.2 or Linux SuSe 6.2. The Linux systems come
with a pack of SGI performance optimization tools. “
“Using a combination of Intel processors and Linux, Pan said
SGI would significantly undercut the prices of Sun’s compute farms,
though she declined to quote prices for any specific
configurations.”