Altix

Altix is a line of servers and supercomputers produced by Silicon Graphics (International), based on Intel processors. It succeeded the MIPS/IRIX-based Origin 3000 servers.

The line was first announced on January 7, 2003, with the Altix 3000 series, based on Intel Itanium 2 processors and SGI's NUMAlink processor interconnect. At product introduction, the system supported up to 64 processors running Linux as a single system image and shipped with a Linux distribution called SGI Advanced Linux Environment, which was compatible with Red Hat Advanced Server. By August 2003, many SGI Altix customers were running Linux on 128p and even 256p SGI Altix systems, but SGI officially announced 256-processor support within a single system image of Linux on March 10, 2004 using an 2.4-based kernel. The SGI Advanced Linux Environment was eventually dropped after support using a standard, unmodified SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) distribution for SGI Altix was provided with SLES 8 and SLES 9. Later, SGI Altix 512-processor systems were officially supported using an unmodified, standard Linux distribution with the launch of SLES 9 SP1. Besides full support of SGI Altix on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, a standard and unmodified Red Hat Enterprise Linux was also fully supported starting with SGI Altix 3700 Bx2 with RHEL 4 and RHEL 5 with system processor limits defined by Red Hat for those releases.

On 14 November 2005, SGI introduced the Altix 4000 series based on the Itanium 2. The Altix 3000 and 4000 are distributed shared memory multiprocessors. SGI later officially supported 1024-processor systems on an unmodified, standard Linux distribution with the launch of SLES 10 in July 2006. SGI Altix 4700 was also officially supported by Red Hat with RHEL 4 and RHEL 5—maximum processor limits were as defined by Red Hat for its RHEL releases.

The Altix brand has also been used for a variety of systems based on multi-core Intel Xeon processors. These include the Altix XE rackmount servers, Altix ICE blade servers and Altix UV supercomputers.

NASA's Columbia supercomputer, installed in 2004, is a 10,240-microprocessor cluster of twenty Altix 3000 systems, each with 512 microprocessors, interconnected with InfiniBand.