MILPITAS, Calif., Nov. 18 — SGI, a global leader in high performance solutions for compute, data analytics and data management, announced that the IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center in the Czech Republic selected an SGI supercomputer to advance research in a variety of fields including nanotechnology, computational chemistry, hydrology, engineering, material science and drug development.

The SGI supercomputer will provide the center with theoretical performance at 2 petaflops, exceeding the performance of the current Anselm supercomputer by nearly 20 times. The large cluster, which will be put into operation in 2015, will be among the 50 largest supercomputers in the world, and will become the largest Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor-based cluster in Europe.

This SGI ICE XA solution will have 1,008 compute nodes and 129 terabytes (TB) of RAM. It will feature 864 Intel Xeon Phi 7120 coprocessors cards with 52,704 cores and 13.8 TB of RAM. The storage will be two petabytes (PB) of disk-based solutions and three PB of tape backup. As a result of this advanced technology, the new supercomputer will be able to provide more precise simulations and modeling, as well as handle more workloads simultaneously than the Center’s previous solution. In addition to enabling advanced academic research, the supercomputer will also be significantly leveraged by industrial partners in the Czech Republic.

“After an extensive year and a half review process during competitive dialogue public procurement, in which leading global suppliers of supercomputing technology participated, the tender of SGI was selected as the most suitable based on the performance and price criteria,” said Martin Palkovič, director of IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center.

“This new supercomputer will be the foundation for a new era of research for our Moravia-Silesian region, the Czech Republic, and the broader European scientific community,” said Ivo Vondrák, rector of VSB – Technical University of Ostrava where IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center is located.

The computer will reside in Ostrava, the third largest city in the Czech Republic, on the premises of VSB – Technical University of Ostrava, and by leveraging SGI’s innovative approach to power and cooling, heat generated by the supercomputer will also be used to heat the building.

“SGI welcomes the opportunity to contribute to the continuing development of research and science in the Czech Republic, and with this supercomputer, their centralized high performance computing facility will truly become world-class,” said Jorge Titinger, president and CEO, SGI. “The IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center is focused on not only the highest performing solution, but also optimizing operating costs in terms of energy consumption, cooling efficiency and the cost of device management. This direction confirms SGI’s solutions strategy to supply our customers with the most efficient and effective computing power while reducing operating costs.”

“The IT4Innovations team needed a solution that brought a combination of power and programmability to its infrastructure for a wide variety of scientific codes,” said Charles Wuischpard, vice president, Data Center Group and general manager of Workstations and HPC, Intel. “The combination of Intel Xeon processors and Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors will deliver on both requirements by offering a dramatic increase in system performance while still ensuring ease of programmability using open industry standards based programming techniques to achieve cutting-edge insights and scientific discovery.”

About IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center 

National Supercomputing Center IT4Innovations conducts research in the fields of supercomputing and embedded computing systems. It operates a state of the art technology and service in this area and makes it available to both local and foreign research teams from academia and industry. Since its founding, the Center is part of an international network of PRACE supercomputing centers and members of its team are internationally recognized experts. The partners of the project are VSB – Technical University of Ostrava, University of Ostrava, Silesian University in Opava, Institute of Geonics, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and Brno University of Technology.

About SGI

SGI is a global leader in high performance solutions for compute, data analytics and data management that enable customers to accelerate time to discovery, innovation and profitability. Visit sgi.com for more information.

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Source: SGI