HPCwire: SGI InfiniteStorage 6700 Targets Streaming Data Apps

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April 28, 2006

SGI InfiniteStorage 6700 Targets Streaming Data Apps

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Silicon Graphics has introduced the SGI InfiniteStorage 6700 system explicitly designed to deliver industry-leading throughput of streaming data in real time -- up to 3 gigabytes per second (GBps) sustained, for read or write. Targeted at industries such as broadcast, 4K digital intermediate (DI), science and government industries, the SGI InfiniteStorage 6700 system's real-time isochronous architecture features 4 Gbit Fibre Channel connectivity. The SGI InfiniteStorage 6700 is a new high-performance version of the rich-media SGI InfiniteStorage RM660 introduced for broadcast and production in late 2004.

Before its official debut at NAB 2006, the SGI InfiniteStorage 6700 was purchased by two long-time SGI customers for two very different applications:

NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. added 600 TB of SGI InfiniteStorage 6700 storage capacity to its Columbia supercomputer deployment, and acquired the new 4 Gb infrastructure to optimize data management with SGI InfiniteStorage Shared Filesystem CXFS. NASA's 10,240-processor Columbia system, an SGI Altix shared-memory computer with Intel Itanium 2 processors, required additional storage capacity to accommodate the massive data management, access and retrieval demands of its user base.
To accommodate the need for greater bandwidth performance prompted by the growing demand for 4K digital intermediates by the motion picture industry, Pacific Title & Art Studio purchased two SGI InfiniteStorage 6700 systems with 50 TB storage. A leading film optical house since 1919, Pacific Title generates 8 to 16 TB of data per day in 2K and 4K digital cinema mastering. The SGI InfiniteStorage 6700 systems, with real-time streams of 3 GBps, were selected to meet the needs of real-time 4K -- which generates data rates in excess of 850MBps -- as well as for the 4 Gbit Fibre Channel architecture, which the facility plans to implement throughout its two locations in Hollywood, Calif.

Various industries will reap the benefits of the SGI InfiniteStorage 6700 system in many applications:

Broadcast

Designed to integrate into existing storage, the SGI InfiniteStorage 6700 can be configured as an ingest/playout server, a playout SAN, or a central repository serving nonlinear editing systems. The 4 Gbit Fibre Channel connectivity and multi-gigabyte bandwidth enables broadcasters to manage, serve and store the massive amounts of data for digital and HD broadcast applications and collaborative production environments.

Production

SGI InfiniteStorage 6700 specifically addresses the problems of faster turnaround in a 4K data-centric media environment -- where Hollywood's all-or-nothing deadlines are paramount -- by providing real-time file delivery in 4K. For example, in the telecine department, each frame is handled as an individual file, totaling 24 files for each second of film. The process requires opening and closing many files consistently and the files have to be on time, because even a millisecond late in opening a file disrupts the continuity. The SGI InfiniteStorage 6700 guarantees real-time delivery through its specialized, low-latency architecture.

High Performance Computing in the Sciences

To find answers to new types of challenging problems, investigators in scientific areas such as physics, material sciences, engineering, bioinformatics and nanotechnology all need to load data sets into the large memory of their supercomputers as rapidly as possible. One example is the Dresden University of Technology (TUD), which purchased $18 million of SGI technology late last year. As part of the German university's purchase, SGI is installing a Storage Area Network (SAN) containing almost 70 TB of online disk capacity that -- in support of the capability computing system part of the installation -- is capable of feeding a petabyte-sized archive tape robot with high data rate. Another 50 TB large SAN will be provided and connected to the throughput system part of the HPC environment. Their original five RM660 systems will be replaced with three SGI InfiniteStorage 6700 systems shortly, which will enable scientists to put an entire database into memory without worrying about the access speeds to disk drives, which are up to a thousand times slower than to memory.

The University is spearheading a new area of HPC by loading datasets off disk drives, across the wire, into the memory of their SGI Altix supercomputer with a required data rate of 8 GBps, enabling scientists to work on data, in real time, in memory. Using the high bandwidth and throughput of the SGI InfiniteStorage 6700 system, they can harness the SGI Altix computer's 4 TB of memory and fill it up with a 4TB dataset very fast. How fast can this be accomplished with the SGI InfiniteStorage 6700 systems? They'll supply the 4 TB in less than 9 minutes.

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