By Brian Proffitt
Managing Editor
Intel’s Itanium 2 processor, codenamed Madison, was officially
released today, and no less than three major vendors have announced
their Linux product plans for the new platform.
High-performance computer maker SGI was the first out of the
gate with their announcment of several new early adopters of the
company’s Linux-based Altix 3000 server line. Many of these
customers have been using pre-release versions of the Altix with
Madision for the last several weeks, but today’s official release
of Madision clears the way for SGI to tout its customer list.
It’s an impressive customer list, too. Luminaries include The
Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, which is
purchasing an SGI Altix 3000 system powered by 416 Intel Itanium 2
processors (1.30 GHz, 3M) and 832GB of memory. The Center for
Computational Sciences at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge
National Laboratory is using a new Altix 3000 installation running
256 Intel Itanium 2 processors (1.50 GHz with 6MB L3 cache) with 2
terabytes of system memory and 1.5 teraFLOPs of computational
power. The University of Minnesota’s Supercomputing Institute will
serve researchers across the state of Minnesota with a new SGI
Altix 3000 system driven by 24 Intel Itanium 2 processors (1.30
GHz, 3MB) and 48GB of system memory.
“With these new Itanium 2 processors, SGI Altix 3000 delivers
precisely the kind of world-record performance required by SGI
customers and developers,” said Dave Parry, senior vice president
and general manager of Servers and Platform Group, SGI. “SGI’s
technical compute customers are among the most demanding users in
the world, and the Altix 3000 system’s ability to extract
near-linear scalability from new processors is a substantial
competitive advantage for them. They realize that the Altix 3000
provides the balance and bandwidth necessary to get the absolute
most from the fastest processors Intel has to offer.”
Another hardware vendor who is taking advantage of the Itanium 2
release today is Texas-based computer maker Dell.
According to a statment from a company spokeswoman, Dell’s new
PowerEdge 3250 server with Intel Itanium 2 processors is available
today, with prices starting at US$5,999. An eight-node clustered
configuration for high performance computing is priced at
US$88,600.
“The dual-processor PowerEdge 3250 server delivers a
cost-effective, scale-out solution for high-performance cluster
computing (HPCC),” Dell’s statement read.
Also today, Dell will offer Intel’s latest Xeon MP processors
with up to 2.8GHz speed and 2MB embedded cache on the PowerEdge
6650 and 6600 four-way servers with prices starting at US$4,999 and
US$5,499, respectively.
On the Transaction Performance Council’s TPC-C benchmark for
performance, a PowerEdge 6600 with four 2.8GHz Xeon MP processors
achieved 84,595 transactions per minute, the fastest performance
for a Xeon-based server, Dell’s statement asserted.
Software vendor Red Hat, Inc. is not to be left out of the
Madison festivities, as the Raleigh, NC-based company announced the
immediate availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS and WS for
Intel Itanium 2.
According to Red Hat, the new solution will deliver major
performance scaling benefits on a standards-based platform for the
most compute intensive business applications.
“Red Hat is committed to delivering the highest levels of
performance for mission-critical datacenter applications. With the
Intel Itanium 2 processor, we’ve seen performance scaling of 33% on
the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform,” said Brian Stevens, vice
president of Operating System Development at Red Hat. “Red Hat
Enterprise Linux continues to lead in performance and value on
Intel-based platforms.”
“Intel and Red Hat have worked closely to optimize Red Hat
Enterprise Linux AS and WS for the powerful new platforms based on
Itanium 2 processors,” said Deborah Conrad, vice president, Intel
Solutions Market Development Group. “The performance
optimization,rigorous testing and validation of the Red Hat
operating system on new Intel-based platforms brings Red Hat
customers the performance and investment protection they demand in
enterprise server environments.”
Red Hat has already lined up a hardware vendor to distribute
Enterprise Server AS and WS for Itanium 2: HP.
“As the market share leader in Itanium 2-based systems, HP was
the first company to offer Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Itanium
2-based servers and workstations,” said Martin Fink, vice president
of Linux, HP. “The increased performance of Red Hat Enterprise
Linux on HP’s latest Itanium 2-based systems will demonstrate to
customers further validation of HP and Red Hat’s enterprise
technologies.”
As the week progresses, expect to see more announcements from
Linux vendors who will also be jumping on the Itanium 2 platform
bandwagon. Not so from IBM, which recently announced they are
pulling back from the own plans to develop for the Itanium
line.
“IBM doesn’t have anyone dedicated to working with Linux on
Itanium,” Ron Favali, a spokesman for IBM said in a recent
interview with InfoWorld. “Our view right now is that Itanium is
like a science project. There’s not a market for it.”