Global Shared Memory
SGI^® NUMAflex^TM Architecture

SGI® Altix® dramatically reduces the time and resources required to run technical applications by managing extremely large data sets in a single, system-wide, shared-memory space. By holding more complex job geometries and entire workflows in memory, SGI Altix can enable new application breakthroughs in life sciences, oil and gas, manufacturing, and physical sciences that traditional Linux® OS-based clusters can't tackle.

Systems with global shared memory allow access to all data in the system's memory directly and efficiently, without having to move data through I/O or networking bottlenecks. Clusters with multiple nodes without global shared memory instead must pass copies of data, often in the form of messages, which can greatly complicate programming and slow down performance by increasing the time processors must wait for data. Global shared memory requires a sophisticated system memory interconnect like SGI® NUMAlink™ and application libraries that enable shared-memory calls, such as MPT and XPMEM from SGI.

Why does this matter? Users can do more and get results sooner. Entire databases can be driven directly out of memory. Hardware and software costs are lower. System administrators and users spend less time feeding and tuning the cluster. Developers have new flexibility to choose any programming model for application scalability. And it's all standards-based Linux.