HPCwire: This week, Silicon Valley startup PANTA Systems unveiled its new server platform called PANTAmatrix. It is an x86-based platform that represents one of the new breed of servers that focuses on I/O performance and SMP configurability. It allows users to dynamically allocate I/O and computational resources across the cluster. A single PANTAmatrix system can support up to 9,000 processors as well as petabytes of storage.

The PANTAmatrix platform is based on an 8U chassis containing a mixture of vertical-oriented blades (or modules). Up to four of these 8U enclosures can go into a single rack. The architecture employs an integrated InfiniBand fabric to connect compute nodes with a shared I/O infrastructure. A single chassis can support two InfiniBand switch modules and up to eight AMD Opteron-based compute modules. Two compute modules can be paired together dynamically via a HyperTransport interconnect to support larger SMP nodes. Since an Opteron module may contain either two or four sockets (containing dual-core processors), nodes can configured to be 4-way, 8-way, or 16-way. Each compute module can hold up to 64 GB of memory, so a maximum of 128 GB per SMP node is possible. Interconnect bandwidth is allocated independently of the SMP size, with up to 12 GB/sec of bandwidth provided to a single node.

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