Octane III is office-ready with a pedestal, one-by-two-foot form factor, whisper-quiet operations, easy-to-use features, low maintenance requirements and support for standard office power outlets. While a typical workstation has only eight cores and moderate memory capacity, the superior design of the Octane III permits up to 80 high-performance cores and nearly 1TB of memory for unparalleled performance…

Octane III is easily configurable with single- and dual-socket node choices, and offers a wide selection of performance, storage, graphics, GP-GPU and integrated networking options. Yielding the same leading power efficiencies inherent in all SGI Eco-Logical compute designs, Octane III supports the latest Intel processors to capitalise on greater levels of performance, flexibility and scalability.

For about $US8000, it’s not cheap by normal computer standards, but by supercomputer standards it’s a bargain. [SGI via The Inquirer via Boing Boing]

According to SGI, the key to make this system work is their proprietary Kelvin cooling technology, which we can only imagine works by pouring buckets of liquid nitrogen over the CPUs. According to them, all this vapourware may result in a computer that can sustain 20,000 threads of execution, with a 15TB/sec memory bandwidth per rack.

• High concurrency with 20,000 threads of execution — 40 times more than a single rack x86 cluster system
• High throughput with 15TB/sec of memory bandwidth per rack — over 20 times faster than a single rack x86 cluster system
• Greater balance with up to three times the memory bandwidth/OPS compared to current x86 CPUs
• High performance with approximately 3.5 times the computational performance per rack
• Greener with low-watt consumer CPUs and low-power memory that deliver 7 times better memory bandwidth/watt
• Innovative Silicon Graphics Kelvin cooling technology, which enables denser packaging by stabilizing thermal operations in densely configured solutions
• Operating environment flexibility, capable of running industry-standard Linux(R) implementations, with Microsoft(R) Windows(R) variants on some configurations

[SGI via Gadget Lab]