From: "Adam Flinton" 

http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20030107S0010

& others.

It's about the SGI big boxes (Altix) which SGI are bring out which only run
Linux. I am really quite surprised as I thought we'd be looking at
2005-2006 for this sort of announcement.

" SGI is aiming the Altix servers at companies in the physical and
life sciences, manufacturing, oil and gas, and government and defense
markets. Each node in the cluster runs a single Linux operating-system
image with up to 64 Itanium 2 processors and 512 Gbytes of memory. SGI uses
its NUMAlink system interconnect fabric to provide memory and communication
between cluster nodes. An entry-level Altix 3300 server, available by the
end of the first quarter, will be priced at $70,176 with four processors
but scales up to 12 processors. The Altix 3700, also available by the end
of the quarter, will scale to hundreds of processors and more than 1
terabyte of memory. A 64-processor system will start at $1.2 million."


Ouch...Cheaper....run on lower end hardware....run on higher end
hardware....run on more CPU types......

I'll bet that the server guys in Redmond are starting to get quite
seriously worried.....I wonder how fast they could port the .Net server
components to Linux?

Adam

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