14 DAY TRIAL // SGI has just announced that the company has developed “the largest and most powerful” Windows server released to date, which uses no less than 128 Intel Xeon processing cores as well as up to 1TB of system memory.
The new server is called the Altix UV 100 and is built around 3U rackmount enclosures, that are powered by Intel Xeon 7500-series processors and support a maximum of two blades.
Each blade can be configured with two Xeon CPUs and can take up to 128GB of memory via 16 DIMM sockets.
The Xeon 7500-series processors were especially designed to be used inside multi-CPU servers and come with four, six or eight processing cores as well as 24MB of Level 3 cache memory.
Intel's Hyper-Threading technology is also supported, so each core can run up to two threads simultaneously, and the chips feature a quad-channel integrated memory controller that supports 1066MHz DDR3 memory.
In addition to the two blades, a 3U enclosure also features four 2.5-inch SAS hot-swap drive bays and 1+1 redundant, hot-swap power supplies and fans.
The Windows-powered Altix UV 100 servers were specially designed for applications such as Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, MathWorks MATLAB, Wolfram Mathematica 8 and Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and run the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system.
“Altix UV can now scale Windows Server technology to record levels," said SGI CEO Mark J. Barrenechea.
“Customers can deploy with confidence their mission-critical software on larger scale hardware platforms supported by Microsoft and SGI with Intel Xeon-based processors.
“We are continuing our joint development work with Microsoft, and expect to scale Windows Server even further in the very near term,” concluded the company's rep.
No details regarding availability have been disclosed together with the product announcement.