SGI has presented Cyclone, its service offering, a software-as-a-Service (SaaS or rent software on a cloud), or the power of a supercomputer on demand (IaaS or Infrastructure as a Service).

Cyclone as SaaS

Cyclone is a cloud service for businesses wishing to take advantage of online applications or computing power needed to run their own programs. In the first case, it is primarily scientific or specialized software like OpenFOAM, NUMECA, AcuSolve, LS-Dyna, Gaussian, Gamess, NAMD, Gromacs, LAMMPS, BLAST, FASTA, HMMER, ClustalW and OntoStudio.

Cyclone as IaaS

Regarding infrastructure, SGI Altix machines puts scale-up, Altix ICE and scale-out hybrid Altix XE clusters available to businesses for $ 0.95 per core and per hour (approx. € 0.71, SGI probably dollar bill). The GB of storage costs $ 0.20 per month and businesses must also hire a Managment node to keep everything running.

All platforms using Xeon or Itanium processors and machine hybrid cluster includes cards from NVIDIA Tesla or ATI FireStream. IMS also provides for the Altix XE, a PCI-Express processor integrates 64 cores of Tilera. Built for Linux, the Tile64 is specialized for network operations and LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP). It is finally possible to choose between Novell SUSE or Red Hat Linux and take advantage of software packages optimize performance.