This is the back side of an aging SGI cluster that we host in our data center at work for the high-performance computing group.
For a sense of scale, this is a 23″ rack, and that’s a grey CAT5 patch cord stretched down the left portion. The white cables are close to an inch thick.
The fat cables with the beautiful, tough braided jackets seem almost synthetic-organic to me. They always make me think of Bishop after he’s been torn in half by the alien.
What kind of SGI system is that and what are the cables?
The 4 year old SGI Altix 3000 has 32 Itanium2 processors and 32 GB RAM. This uses hypercube topology to minimize the number of hops between any processor and any memory. This 400 MB/sec NUMALink allows a single system image. See http://www.csm.ornl.gov/~dunigan/sgi/numalink.gif .
Nice cables. Unfortunately, nice cables usually equals expensive cables.