Silicon Graphics ICE X, User Manual

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38 007-5806-004
3: System Overview
System Features and Major Components
The main features of the SGI ICE X series server systems are introduced in the following sections:
• “Modularity and Scalability” on page 38
• “Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability (RAS)” on page 45
Modularity and Scalability
The SGI ICE X series systems are modular, blade-based, scalable, high-density cluster systems.
The system rack components are primarily housed in building blocks referred to as blade
enclosure pairs. Each enclosure pair consists of a sheet-metal housing with internal IB backplanes
and six (shared) power supplies that serve two “blade enclosures”.
However, other “free-standing” SGI compute servers are used to administer, access and service
the SGI ICE X series systems. Additional optional mass storage may be added to the system along
with additional blade enclosures. You can add different types of stand-alone module options to a
system rack to achieve the desired system configuration. You can configure and scale blade
enclosures around processing capability, memory size or InfiniBand fabric I/O capability. The
air-cooled blade enclosure has redundant, hot-swap fans and redundant, hot-swap power supplies.
A water-chilled rack option expands an ICE X rack’s heat dissipation capability for the blade
enclosure components without requiring lower ambient temperatures in the lab or server room.
See Figure 4-3 on page 59 for an example water-chilled D-rack.
A number of free-standing (non-blade) compute and I/O servers (also referred to as nodes) are
used with SGI ICE X series systems in addition to the standard two-socket blade-based compute
nodes. These free-standing units are:
• System administration controller
• System rack leader controller (RLC) server
• Service nodes with the following functions:
– Fabric management service node
– Login node
– Batch node
– I/O gateway node
– MDS or OSS nodes (used in optional Lustre configurations)