News Briefs - Hardware:

Microway Intros Navion-8 Eight-way AMD Opteron SMP Server

Microway will exhibit the first custom 8-way SMP Opteron server at Supercomputing Booth 1534. With 8 SMP Opteron 800 series processors and up to 128 GB memory, this platform is ideal for 64-bit compute- intensive applications including CFD, FEA, DB2 and Oracle. Housed in a newly designed 4U rack mount chassis based on Microway's legendary RuggedRack technology, the configuration includes Microway's Nodewatch and MCMS hardware/software management solution for remote cluster monitoring and control.

Available for immediate delivery, Navion-8 includes Iwill's 8-way Opteron HTX Pro Tech board set, four 500 watt Hot-Swap power supplies, de-rated to 1350 Watts, and up to 5 SCSI or SATA hard drives. The AMD Opterons operate at 2.2 GHz and feature HyperTransport technology. A complete product description can be found at http://www.microway.com/navion8.

The low latency, cache coherent HyperTransport technology used to connect the eight processors makes it possible to run SMP applications using the OpenMP paradigm, in addition to the standard MPI paradigm. For distributed memory parallel applications, the four 133 MHz PCI-X slots support pairs of Myrinet or InfiniBand cards in the PCI-X peripheral cage. This enables distributed memory MPI applications with up to 1.6 GB/sec of bandwidth with 6 microsecond latencies.

In addition to providing unmatched scalable memory bandwidth, the HypterTransport interconnects make it possible to achieve interprocessor latencies on the order of 100 to 200 nanoseconds. This is an order of magnitude faster than that achieved by interconnects such as Quadrics; making Navion-8 the best platform for running fine grain parallel applications that can be tackled by any 8 processor system.

The RuggedRack's hard drive bay offers maximum storage flexibility for SCSI, SATA or ATA hard drives, accommodating five Hot-Swap 3.5" devices to create an internal RAID system with a total storage of up to 2 TB.

Microway's 4U RuggedRack features proprietary "Across-the-Board" enhanced cooling. Microway is well known for its expertise in cooling and achieved thermals are consistently lower than industry guidelines. Front-positioned hard disks and power supplies running in Hot-Swap mode allow most system components to be serviced without powering off the server, or removing the unit from the cabinet.

"Navion-8 completes Microway's Navion Opteron server and cluster product line," commented Ann Fried, Chairperson of Microway. "It offers a first rate platform for demanding enterprise, military and HPC applications. Our engineers designed this platform for scalability, excellent cooling, and robustness. It is the best price/performance AMD Opteron-based 8-way server on the market today."