The Hindu Business Line : SGI in pacts for database-storage platform

Bangalore, June 27 US-based SGI and Intel have announced a collaboration to tackle issues in the high performance computing market. SGI and Oracle are also teaming up to offer a database-storage platform for the market.

The SGI-Oracle product is called Database Accelerator.

In high performance computing, primary issues include the need to scale up to larger configurations, run high computational workloads, cool blade servers, and reduce the price-performance costs. To address these issues, the two firms designed a new version of SGI’s Atoka board. It allows a blade server to run on two dual/quad-core Intel Xeon processors with 32 GB of memory. SGI unveiled its new line of blade servers – the Altix ICE (integrated compute environment) 8200 – which runs on this board. A single SGI Altix ICE 8200 rack can deliver six teraflops (1 teraflop is the equivalent of one trillion operations performed per second) of performance.

With unique water-cooled doors (blade servers heat up easily) and the removal of disk drives (storage) from the compute blades, which consequently reduces the price/performance costs, and the easy management interface, the Altix ICE solution is designed to address the HPC needs of the Indian market, said Mr Ravi Pendekanti, Senior Director, Solutions Marketing, SGI.

The company is already in discussions with four-five companies in the manufacturing, research and energy domains. It has 500 clients in India. Worldwide, the $525-million company is targeting a market of $12.5 billion, including weather forecasting, financial and marketing clientele. Pure HPC was around a third of this, he said. It competes with the likes of IBM and Hewlett-Packard and holds 2.8 per cent of the HPC market share.

SGI and Oracle are now jointly targeting a $4 billion opportunity in the enterprise database market with a database-storage platform that will speed up high performance computing by up to 10 times, according to Mr Pendekanti. This is possible using IMDB, a high performance database from Oracle’s recent acquisition of TimesTen, a firm that develops real-time, in-memory databases. India will present up to 10-12 per cent of this market.