MILPITAS, Calif., Dec. 23 — SGI, a global leader in high performance solutions for compute, data analytics and data management, announced that the Department of Defense (DoD) has awarded SGI a second $30 million contract as part of its High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP). The contract is for an SGI ICE X supercomputer with SGI InfiniteStorage and is part of the DoD’s ongoing initiative to improve high performance computing (HPC) resources. The system will bolster the compute capabilities of the DoD Supercomputing Resource Center (DSRC) at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) located at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. The HPCMP’s first award was announced in October, also part of the annual Technology Insertion program, and will provide a supercomputer to the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) located in Vicksburg, Mississippi.
The HPCMP provides the DoD supercomputing capabilities, high-speed network communications and computation science expertise that enable DoD scientists and engineers to conduct a wide-range of focused research, development and test activities. This partnership puts advanced technology in the hands of the U.S. Armed Forces more quickly, less expensively, and with greater certainty of success.
The AFRL DSRC will receive an SGI ICE X supercomputer with Intel Haswell processors, Intel Xeon Phi, and NVIDIA GPGPUs with a high performance SGI InfiniteStorage 5600 storage system based on NetApp E-Series technology, running Intel Enterprise Edition for Lustre file system. The open standards-based system will run SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. The system, Thunder, will deliver theoretical peak performance of 5.6 Petaflops, which is expected to be the fastest unclassified system in the DoD.
The hybrid system will allow the AFRL DSRC and its scientists to perform modeling and simulation and examine the applicability of specific accelerators to key applications that effectively meet the user community’s workload.
“Thunder’s capability is amazing, and reaffirms our commitment to providing our customers with world-class computational tools,” said Jeff Graham, director of the AFRL DSRC. “The power of Thunder will drive solutions to the most challenging problems facing our nation in today’s volatile global environment.”
The system will consist of 125,888 compute cores, 356 NVIDIA GPGPUs, 356 Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors and 12 petabytes of usable storage. Thunder will be co-located with the 8 M-Cell SGI ICE system, Spirit, deployed in 2012 and will feature 6 M-Cells — SGI’s single largest M-Cell deployment. SGI M-Cell technology provides industry-leading power and cooling efficiency.
“We look forward to closely partnering with the AFRL DSRC to deliver unprecedented speed, scale, and efficiency to its user community,” said Jorge Titinger, president and CEO, SGI. “Evidenced by our partnership with the HPCMP over the last two decades, SGI is committed to providing the best computational technologies available that increase the productivity of the DoD’s Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation community.”
Awarded by the U.S. Army Engineering and Support Center, Huntsville, the AFRL and ERDC contracts are each valued at more than $30 million product revenue and include four separately priced one year options for maintenance. The systems are expected to be operational in summer 2015.
To learn more about SGI ICE X, visit www.sgi.com/icex.
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Source: SGI