SGI and SuSE team up for supercomputing

SGI and SuSE Linux are working on what they claim will be the world's first fully supported 64-processor Linux system.

Expected to be available in October, the Linux supercomputer will see SGI bundle SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 on SGI Altix 3000 servers and superclusters.

SuSE Linux will support the 64-processor single-node scaling capabilities of the SGI platform and will also provide third-level support to SGI customers.

The companies will also work to scale Linux to 128 processors, a project which, they said, will be completed next year.

SuSE's chief alliance officer, Uwe Heine, said in a statement: "Together SuSE and SGI can deliver high-performance Linux systems capable of handling the unique system load demands of scalable integer processing, throughput and memory."

SGI's Altix 3000 servers and superclusters combine the firm's supercomputing architecture with Intel Itanium 2 processors and the Linux operating system.

The supercluster scales up to 64 processors within each node and allows global shared-memory access across nodes.

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