HPCwire: SGI Altix System Fuels Climate Research in China

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September 14, 2007

SGI Altix System Fuels Climate Research in China

SUNNYVALE, Calif. and SHANGHAI, China, Sept. 12 -- March 1, 2007 to March 1, 2008, marks the fourth International Polar Year (IPY) -- a large scientific program focused on research in both polar caps, the Arctic and the Antarctic, to recognize the strong links these regions have with the global climate changes. This year's activities mark China's first IPY efforts, and the Polar Research Institute of China (PRIC) selected compute technology from SGI to enable this important scientific research mission.

"Our research is focused on how the Earth's Polar Regions affect global climate systems," said Dr. Sun, head of the Oceanographic Polar Region Research Lab. "With the study of the ice-sea model, we will predict the global climate changes as well as low and medium latitude climate trends. We are not computer science experts, but we found SGI's supercomputer very easy to deploy to serve our research goal. SGI's engineers are very professional to set up not only the hardware, but also the software environment and application code. SGI's turnkey solution is expected to accelerate our research and time to insight significantly."

PRIC researchers are running a host of climate models which benefit significantly from the 64GB of shared-memory of their new SGI Altix 4700 server. Built using SGI's powerful scalable shared-memory architecture and featuring a high-performance, industry-standard 64-bit Linux environment, the SGI Altix 4700 enables all processors direct access to the global shared-memory for optimal performance on big data problems and ease of programming. Among the climate models being used by PRIC are:

GFDL Modular Ocean Model (MOM4), a 3-dimensional, z-coordinate, primitive equation ocean circulation model
Princeton Ocean Model (POM), a sigma coordinate, free surface, ocean model, which includes a turbulence sub-model
NCAR's Spectral Transform SWM (Shallow Water Model), a parallel algorithm that solves the nonlinear shallow water equations on a rotating sphere using the spectral transform method
Atmosphere-Ocean Model (AOM), designed at GISS for climate predictions at decade to century time scales

"SGI applauds the remarkable work of these dedicated researchers in unlocking the secrets to global climate change," said Alex Lee, country manager of SGI Greater China Region. "As more and more data are being generated from multi-disciplined research about the Polar regions, the integrated high performance and scalability of SGI Altix systems continue to help scientists and engineers achieve what just a short time ago was considered impossible. The achievements of these scientists illustrate that SGI truly delivers Innovation for Results."

"This system serves almost all the disciplines of our research area," said Mr. Zhu Jiangang, Director of Polar Information Center, who serves different labs within the institute added, "Besides the oceanographic research labs, some other labs, like upper atmosphere physics lab also migrated their own developed code from PC clusters to this platform with very positive results. They were able to significantly improve their productivity."

PRIC's new SGI Altix 4700 system powered by 32 Intel Intanium 2 processors with 64GB globally shared memory, and running Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, was installed in May.

About the SGI Altix 4700

SGI Altix 4700 platform is comprised of modular blades -- interchangeable compute, memory, I/O and special purpose blades for 'plug and solve' configuration flexibility. The innovative blade-to-NUMAlink architecture enables users to mix and match eight standardized blade choices, for perfect system right-sizing. The compact blade packaging of the Altix 4700 rack also provides excellent performance density. SGI Altix 4700 Platform also integrates SGI's Peer I/O technology which enables high-speed access to SGI's large shared memory for all system components. Through peer I/O, SGI Altix 4700 is the first SGI platform designed to support new computing paradigms, such as reconfigurable computing through SGI RASC technology that will take over where Moore's Law leaves off.

About the International Polar Year (IPY)

The Polar Regions are remote areas of the Earth that have profound significance for the Earth's climate and ultimately environments, ecosystems and human society. However we still remain remarkably ignorant of many aspects of how polar climate operates and its interaction with polar environments, ecosystems and societies. To have any hope of understanding the current global climate and what might happen in future the science community needs a better picture of conditions at the poles and how they interact with and influence the oceans, atmosphere and land masses. The Polar Regions are highly sensitive to climate change and this raises real concern for the future of polar ecosystems and Arctic society. www.ipy.org.

About the Polar Research Institute of China (PRIC)

PRIC is Chinese research center in the field of comprehensive studies of the polar region. The institute is in charge of Key Laboratory of Polar Science of the State Oceanic Administration. Research at the institute focuses on: polar glaciology, polar oceanographic science, polar upper atmospheric physics, polar biological science and polar information platform. The institute has established Polar Snow Ice and Global Change Laboratory, Ionospheric Physics Laboratory, Auroral and Magnetospheric Physics Laboratory, Polar Organism Analytical Laboratory, Microorganism and Molecular Biology Analytical Laboratory, Biochemistry Analytical Laboratory, Polar Microbe Culture Collection and Shipboard Laboratory. National Field Research Stations have been established at Antarctic Great Wall Station and Zhongshan Station, and they are the research bases of Antarctic snow ice and space environment. www.pric.gov.cn.

About SGI

SGI (NASDAQ: SGIC) is a leader in high-performance computing. SGI delivers a complete range of high-performance server and storage solutions along with industry-leading professional services and support that enable its customers to overcome the challenges of complex data-intensive workflows and accelerate breakthrough discoveries, innovation and information transformation. SGI solutions help customers solve their computing challenges whether it's enhancing the quality of life through drug research, designing and manufacturing safer and more efficient cars and airplanes, studying global climate, providing technologies for homeland security and defense, or helping enterprises manage large data. With offices worldwide, the company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., and can be found on the Web at www.sgi.com.

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Source: SGI

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