MILPITAS, Calif. and TOKYO, Japan, June 30 — SGI Japan, Ltd. part of SGI, a global leader in high performance solutions for compute, data analytics and data management, announced the acceptance of an order from Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) for the Agency’s next supercomputer system. The large-scale parallel calculation system with SGI ICE X, the world’s most powerful distributed-memory system, will help various research and development projects, including improvement in atomic safety and technical assistance for nuclear emergency preparedness projects. The new supercomputer will commence operation in November of this year.

At JAEA, the only comprehensive research and development institution for nuclear energy in Japan, supercomputers are essential for efficient and effective promotion of research and development. In recent years, JAEA’s calculation demands have grown due to more advanced and diverse fields of studies. The current system, which started operation in 2010, exceeds the rate of utilization by 90 percent annually and significantly lacks the compute resources to efficiently complete the intense calculation demands of JAEA. In order to respond to this shortage of calculation resources, the current system is being updated to provide significantly better performance.

The large-scale parallel processing section at the heart of the new SGI ICE X system offers 35 racks of Intel Xeon processors E5-2680 v3 embedded with 2,510 nodes. The large-scale parallel calculation system boasts 60,240 cores and 156.87 terabytes of memory with high-speed interconnect technology 4x FDR InfiniBand applied for interconnection of the calculation blades. The theoretical calculation performance of the large-scale processing section is 2.4 petaflops, which is 12 times the previous system, and is expected to have the highest performance among Intel Xeon processor based cluster systems without coprocessor or processing accelerators in Japan.

“By providing the new SGI ICE X system for the JAEA, SGI is looking forward to offering a twelve-fold increase in performance over the Agency’s previous system,” said Jorge Titinger, president and CEO, SGI. “JAEA is a perfect example of how our technology is constantly powering organizations response to significant compute demands to effectively and efficiently complete research tasks that lead to scientific discovery.”

The storage system deploys SGI InfiniteStorage 17500 with five petabytes of total physical capacity. The open source Lustre File System is used to configure a high-speed, stable parallel file system for smooth reads and writes of a huge volume of calculation data. In addition, the SGI Rackable Standard-Depth Server is introduced to the systems for the processing sections of Independent Software Vendor (ISV) application, visualization and individual login.

“I welcome the fact that Japan Atomic Energy Agency is introducing the large-scale parallel calculation system with the core of SGI Japan’s SGI ICE X where the latest Intel product, Intel Xeon processors E5-2680 v3 are embedded,” said Kosuke Hirano, senior executive officer, Business Development, Intel K.K. “The Intel Xeon processor E5-2680 v3 has improved performance of up to three times Intel products of the previous generation and achieves enhancement of many functions, including efficient power consumption at the highest level in the world and greater security as well. I expect that the processors from Intel and the excellent technology of SGI will be utilized in various research and development projects.”

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Source: SGI