Nov. 17 — SGI (NASDAQ: SGI), a global leader in high-performance solutions for compute, data analytics and data management, announced that the Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute (CINVESTAV) through SGI’s valued partner, B-Cause IT Advisors, in Mexico has selected a SGI ICE X supercomputer to facilitate research that will enhance the country’s computing capabilities for scientific, technological, economic, and social research projects.
CINVESTAV is a public research institution that closely collaborates with the National Polytechnic Institute, one of Mexico’s largest public universities, to improve living standards and promote development in Mexico through a better understanding of science and technology. The SGI ICE X system will be used for the ABACUS-CINVESTAV project, which is an initiative of the Mexico State Council of Science and Technology and the National Council for Science and Technology in conjunction with CINVESTAV that aims to improve high performance computing (HPC) capabilities in Mexico.
After researching several competing high performance computing systems, CINVESTAV chose the SGI ICE X due to the systems’ configuration flexibility, leading energy efficiency and capability to optimize performance of the various applications that will be running on the machine. The applications will support several projects including the study of soil, climate and reforestation for the Abacus region, mapping the brain to help provide a more efficient strategy during surgery, volcanic risk, and modelling oil wells. The SGI ICE X system enables CINVESTAV to conduct compute-intensive research initiatives without going outside the country. In addition, the system enables CINVESTAV to execute on its goal of introducing the next generation of scientists and researchers to the benefits of HPC.
“We are thrilled to deploy one of the fastest supercomputers in Latin America and expect it to be ranked in the TOP500 supercomputers in the world,” said Isidoro Gitler, director of ABACUS at CINVESTAV. “Environmental impact played a definitive role in our decision to choose the SGI ICE X system and SGI’s ability to seamlessly combine energy efficiency and flexible compute power made a perfect match for our growing base of researchers.”
The 400 teraflop scale-out SGI ICE X supercomputer will feature 8,904 cores with the latest Intel® Xeon® E5-2697 v3 processors, plus 100 Nvidia k40 GPU accelerators and 1.2 petabytes of Seagate ClusterStor™ storage. The deployment will also use SGI’s advanced cooling technologies to provide a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of less than 1.2, making it one of the most powerful and energy efficient systems in Mexico.
CINVESTAV employs around 650 researchers who cover a broad range of scientific topics in more than 10 labs across Mexico. The researchers leverage the SGI ICE X system through established research groups focusing on diverse, compute-intensive topics spanning cosmology and mathematics to forestry and neurology. By enabling universities and companies throughout Mexico access to the SGI ICE X system, CINVESTAV aims to positively impact scientific, economic and social aspects within Mexico.
“With this new supercomputer, CINVESTAV has given its researchers access to near limitless insights into some of today’s most complex problems,” said Jorge Titinger, president and CEO of SGI. “Our system has given them the application performance, ease of use and energy efficiency necessary to reach the forefront of academic research and we look forward to the innovative discoveries they make using this machine.”
“Seagate is proud to partner with SGI on this challenging and rewarding project for CINVESTAV,” said Ken Claffey, vice president and general manager, Seagate HPC systems business. “Together, we’re able to meet stringent power and cooling specifications to deliver a highly efficient system engineered for the advancement of HPC in Mexico.”
About SGI
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Source: SGI