SGI Octane III Personal Supercomputer Released

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When it comes to PCs there’s always an underlying ‘mine’s better than yours’ battle going on and, yes, your high performance gaming rig (assuming you have one) may well be the talk of all your friends but, in terms of sheer, unadulterated power, you’ll doubtless be feeling somewhat less coy with the news that SGI have now released their Octane III Personal Supercomputer which comes with a number of options including packing in up to 19 Atom single socket CPUs or, for the ultimate in power, 20 Intel Xeon Processor Quad-Core processors.

Of course, the SGI Octane III Personal Supercomputer is far removed from that of a gaming rig as the Octane III is intended for ‘strategic science, research, development and visualization’ applications and, thanks to the processor options available, as you’d expect, it costs, and costs dearly (we’ll hold back regarding just how much till later).

Coming in a one-by-two-foot form factor, the SGI Octane III is available in three distinct configurations offering a maximum of 80 high-performance cores paired with 760GB 1333/1066/800 MHz DDR3 RAM powered by up to four 1000W modules – which leads us to suspect that SGI will hardly be touting the Octane III’s eco-friendliness during any sale patter. The specific options available are (incidentally, if you want more detail, see the spec sheet included below):

• Ten dual-socket, Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor 5500 series-based nodes
• One dual-socket, Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor 5500 series-based workstation with advanced NVIDIA graphics and/or GP-GPU card support
• Nineteen single-socket, Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor 3400 series-based nodes
• Nineteen single-socket, Dual-Core Intel Atom processor-based nodes

“Octane III makes supercomputing personal again,” said Mark J. Barrenechea, president and CEO of SGI. Who introduced the Octane III.“Our customers have been asking for office environment products with large core counts that are easy to use and whisper-quiet. Octane III brings all of this to the HPC professional, and enables a new era of personal innovation in strategic science, research, development and visualization.”

Shipping as a ‘factory-tested, pre-integrated platform with broad HPC application support’ that’s ‘powerful enough for the most complex applications in the world’, the SGI Octane III Personal Supercomputer which will happily engage in fluid dynamics, quantum mechanics, molecular dynamics, seismic processing, data analytics, rendering, visualization and computer-aided design quite possibly with a somewhat nonchalant shrug starts at around $8,000 but, if you ant to max it out (and we don’t doubt you do) you’ll need to have significantly more exposable income going spare – though, understandably, SGI aren’t actually offering an insight as to how much the top of the range Octane III will cost you.

Needless to say, if you have to ask…