Speaking of SGI, I was expecting the Cray XC family to be able to do that with the ludicrously fast interconnects they have, but I couldn't find any mention of it.
No, an XC40 runs a kernel on each node, the programming model is MPI, not SSI with NUMA. It runs a minimalist Linux distro called CLE. The nodes are surprisingly small, in terms of memory too, 64 or 128G. Physically they are beautiful to look at, so clean, just a CPU and some memory and nothing extraneous. Cray really should do glass cases.
No, the Ares interconnect is brutally fast but it fundamentally isn’t doing anything as complicated as that. It acts as both storage and networking between the nodes.
