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3: System Overview
System Components
The Altix 450 series system features the following major components:
• 20U rack. The “short” rack is a custom rack used with the Altix 450 system. It holds up to 4
IRUs or a combination of IRUs and option modules (such as mass storage).
• 42U rack. The “tall” rack is a custom rack used for both the compute and I/O rack in the
Altix 450 system. Up to 8 IRUs can be installed in each rack. There is also a 2U space
reserved at the top for an option module.
• Individual Rack Unit (IRU). This enclosure contains the compute/memory blades, IA
blade (base I/O), standard routers and optional I/O blades for the Altix 450 series systems.
The enclosure is 5U high.
• Compute/Memory blade. Holds up to two IA-64 processor sockets and 4, 8 or 12 memory
DIMMs.
• Memory-only blade. This blade acts as a memory expansion node with no processor
compute circuitry included on the blade. This blade holds 4, 8, or 12 memory DIMMs.
• Single-wide PCI-X expansion blade. This two-slot PCI/PCI-X option blade supplies an
individual PCI bus for each option card.
• Double-wide PCI-X expansion blade. Supports three PCI/PCI-X 133 MHz 64-bit option
cards. This three-slot blade features card carriers that allow you to slide PCI/PCI-X boards
directly into and out of the unit.
• Single-wide PCIe expansion blade. The single wide PCI blade supports one or two PCI
Express option cards. Note that when used with a 3D PCIe graphics card, only one can be
inserted due to space constraints.
• Double-wide PCIe/PCI-X expansion blade. This blade supports two PCI Express option
cards and two PCI/PCI-X option cards. Note that when this blade is used with two 3D PCIe
graphics cards the PCI-X slots cannot be used due to space constraints.
• IA/IA2 blade (Base I/O blade). Double-wide I/O blade that supports all base system I/O
functions including one or two disk drives, a DVD drive, two low-profile PCI-X card slots,
two ethernet ports, one SAS/SATAII port, and four USB ports. Optional RAID 1
functionality and DVD-R/W is available with the IA2 version of the base I/O blade only.
Figure 3-5 on page 77 shows the Altix 450 IRU system components.