Aims to Help Facilities Balance Performance, Capacity Requirements

SGI today announced Altix XE, a new line of Linux-based servers and preconfigured clusters using Intel Xeon processors, as well as a new render manager that integrates the Qube! system from PipelineFX. The announcements, which offer a flexible counterpart to the Intel Itanium 2-based Altix 4700 and Altix 450, are part of an effort by SGI to broaden the appeal of its product portfolio as the company restructures to pull itself out of bankruptcy.
The Altix XE210 and XE240 are available as standalone servers or clusters, or can run in the same rack with an Altix system, allowing facilities to balance their needs between the higher performance of the Altix and the higher capacity of the Altix XE. Pricing for an Altix XE cluster starts at $3100.

“The XE line is bringing us back into the rendering part of the market, for 3D, color-correction or special effects and gaming as well as 2D image processing,” Louise Ledeen, market segment manager for media industries, told Film & Video. “Many of those apps do not require the Itanium 2 processor or the expanded memory system we have. Our goal is to be able to go into these same facilities or departments and offer a more turnkey approach to servers or rendering clusters.”

Ledeen said SGI has traditionally specialized in high-end platforms that offered plenty of horsepower for demanding animation and post-production work at facilites that need to push 4K images or tens of millions of particles through their pipelines. “But that’s not usually the bread-and-butter business of these companies,” she noted. “If you’re doing rendering, you may have two or three large environments or model shots, but most other kinds of animation won’t require that kind of scalability of memory.”

The initial rendering bundle will have a two-RU XE240 server running the PipelineFX render-management software, six dual-core one-RU XE210 chassis, and the PipelineFX Qube! software, which interfaces with Autodesk 3dsmax, Maya and Studio, Softimage XSI, Mental Images Mental Ray, and Pixar’s Renderman, Ledeen said. The system will be on display at SIGGRAPH.