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Monday 08 Dec 2008, 12:01am
Intel’s Nehalem steals the show at SC08
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The big news at Supercomputing 08, this year's get-together of ultra-fast computing aficionados, was competition between processor families.
Despite announcements around AMD's Shanghai processors and nVidia's Tesla co-processors, the hot topic was Intel's "Nehalem" Xeons, according to the Register - even though these won't be available for servers until March 2009.
"According to one server maker, server bigwigs as well as experts from supercomputing labs are being given previews of the Nehalems in private viewing rooms at the show - ones where journalists are not invited - and being told about the expected feeds and speeds of the processors running HPC code," said the Register.
Super Micro, which makes system boards for tier one server companies, already has Nehalem-ready boards, and – according to the Register - has signed up Appro, Silicon Graphics, Sun Micro Systems and Verari Systems to use them.
The company showed three Nehalem boards at SC08, in Dallas Texas, all of which use the "Tylersburg" IOH-36D chipset. The two-socket X8DA3 has up to 96 GB of main memory, as well as plenty of expansion slots - including two internal USB ports to hold flash memory drives for loads such as the VMware or XenServer hypervisors. The X8DTN+ board has more memory, with a maximum of 144 GB. The company also showed a Nehalem blade, for Gigabit Ethernet or Infiniband.
At the same event, SGI also showed off Nehalem-ready boards.
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