October 22, 2012
FREMONT, Calif., Oct. 22 — SGI (NASDAQ: SGI), the trusted leader in technical computing, announced it has been chosen by Air Liquide to provide a 15 Teraflop High Performance Computing (HPC) solution.
As SGI France's longest-standing client, Air Liquide is the world leader in gases for industry, health and the environment with a presence in 80 countries and 46,200 employees. The new system is an essential tool for the group's scientists as they search for solutions that can benefit their clients.
The HPC configuration is the third upgrade of the SGI ICE blade server initially installed at Air Liquide in 2008 demonstrating the ability of the ICE platform to be refreshed regularly with newer technology, in this case with Intel® Xeon® E5-2670 processors and Mellanox FDR InfiniBand® Non-blocking Interconnect technology. The system is configured in a dual-plane 'hypercube' topology, one of four topologies supported by SGI ICE X, and contains several hundred Xeon cores and 2.3 terabytes of memory. An SGI® InfiniteStorage™ 5500 RAID array is integrated with the system to provide user temporary file space via network file system (NFS) or common Internet file system (CIFS), and a remote visualization capability was also developed by SGI using VirtualGL/Tiger software and NVIDIA® GPUs.
"Since 1987 when Air Liquide's first graphics server was installed at the Claude-Delorme Research Center, SGI and Air Liquide has built a long-standing relationship driving innovation with HPC," stated Marc Simon, technical director of SGI France. "The various configurations that have entered into production based on our close collaboration for more than 25 years are a source of pride for all of us at SGI."
"High Performance Computing requirements are steadily increasing in our sector and are allowing for accelerated innovation in the areas of energy, environment and health," said Frédéric Camy-Peyret, Modelling & Numerical Simulation R&D program director for Air Liquide. "With simulations that are increasingly reliable and detailed, our molecular modelling and fluid dynamics applications require not only innovative computing architectures, but also high-performance storage. This is a comprehensive solution that SGI can provide."
At Air Liquide, numerical simulation represents a cornerstone of the approach to innovation chain used in order to understand, predict and optimise Air Liquide's processes and those of its clients. This approach opens up new paths for gases for industry, health and the environment. In particular, high-performance simulation allows for the better forecasting of technological changes and makes it possible for new solutions to reach the market faster. In the areas of energy and environment, it is extremely important to control an innovation from the laboratory phase through to industrial deployment via predictive numerical simulation.
"Our researchers are coming up with more and more simulations and are generating increasingly high-volume amounts of data. Access to files has become just as important as raw computing power. This balance has had a crucial impact on our IT infrastructure," Camy-Peyret concludes.
The computing power is expected to be upgraded in 2013 with the addition of approximately 10 teraflops to the SGI ICE X supercomputer, making use of the next-generation Intel Xeon processor family.
About SGI
SGI, the trusted leader in technical computing, is focused on helping customers solve their most demanding business and technology challenges. Visit sgi.com for more information. Connect with SGI on Twitter (@sgi_corp), YouTube (youtube.com/sgicorp), Facebook (facebook.com/sgiglobal) and LinkedIn.
-----
Source: SGI
Contributing commentator, Andrew Jones, offers a break in the news cycle with an assessment of what the national "size matters" contest means for the U.S. and other nations...
Read more...
Today at the International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzing, Germany, Jack Dongarra presented on a proposed benchmark that could carry a bit more weight than its older Linpack companion. The high performance conjugate gradient (HPCG) concept takes into account new architectures for new applications, while shedding the floating point....
Read more...
Not content to let the Tianhe-2 announcement ride alone, Intel rolled out a series of announcements around its Knights Corner and Xeon Phi products--all of which are aimed at adding some options and variety for a wider base of potential users across the HPC spectrum. Today at the International Supercomputing Conference, the company's Raj....
Read more...
Jun 19, 2013 |
Supercomputer architectures have evolved considerably over the last 20 years, particularly in the number of processors that are linked together. One aspect of HPC architecture that hasn't changed is the MPI programming model.
Read more...
Jun 18, 2013 |
The world's largest supercomputers, like Tianhe-2, are great at traditional, compute-intensive HPC workloads, such as simulating atomic decay or modeling tornados. But data-intensive applications--such as mining big data sets for connections--is a different sort of workload, and runs best on a different sort of computer.
Read more...
Jun 18, 2013 |
Researchers are finding innovative uses for Gordon, the 285 teraflop supercomputer housed at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) that has a unique Flash-based storage system. Since going online, researchers have put the incredibly fast I/O to use on a wide variety of workloads, ranging from chemistry to political science.
Read more...
Jun 17, 2013 |
The advent of low-power mobile processors and cloud delivery models is changing the economics of computing. But just as an economy car is good at different things than a full size truck, an HPC workload still has certain computing demands that neither the fastest smartphone nor the most elastic cloud cluster can fulfill.
Read more...
Jun 14, 2013 |
For all the progress we've made in IT over the last 50 years, there's one area of life that has steadfastly eluded the grasp of computers: understanding human language. Now, researchers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) are utilizing a Hadoop cluster on its Longhorn supercomputer to move the state of the art of language processing a little bit further.
Read more...
05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.
04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.
Join HPCwire Editor Nicole Hemsoth and Dr. David Bader from Georgia Tech as they take center stage on opening night at Atlanta's first Big Data Kick Off Week, filmed in front of a live audience. Nicole and David look at the evolution of HPC, today's big data challenges, discuss real world solutions, and reveal their predictions. Exactly what does the future holds for HPC?
Join our webinar to learn how IT managers can migrate to a more resilient, flexible and scalable solution that grows with the data center. Mellanox VMS is future-proof, efficient and brings significant CAPEX and OPEX savings. The VMS is available today.