HPCwire: NASA Taps SGI for Next Major Supercomputer

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

Leading HPC
Solution Providers

HPCwire >> Off the Wire

May 06, 2008

NASA Taps SGI for Next Major Supercomputer

SUNNYVALE, Calif., May 6 -- NASA has chosen SGI to supply its next major supercomputer, a 20,480-core SGI Altix ICE system, after a competitive evaluation the space agency launched last year.

The new SGI system, to be installed this summer in the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, presents vast new opportunities for scientists and engineers who are attempting to tackle some of the largest and most complex problems in history. The supercomputer will be capable of generating 245 trillion operations per second (Teraflops).

NASA's plan to resume manned missions to the moon -- and eventually manned exploration of Mars -- is one of the chief reasons for securing a new, exceptionally powerful computing resource. In addition to space exploration, the new SGI supercomputer will support NASA's aeronautics, science and space operations initiatives.

Powered by the latest Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors, the new supercomputer will feature more than 20,800 Gigabytes (GB) of system memory -- equal to the memory found in 10,000 of today's desktop PCs. NASA also will deploy a next-generation SGI InfiniteStorage InfiniBand disk solution capable of storing and managing 450 Terabytes (TB) of data -- an amount five times larger than the entire print collection of the Library of Congress. The installation also includes a 115TB SGI InfiniteStorage NEXIS Network Attached Storage solution.

The system will augment NASA's Columbia supercomputer, an SGI Altix system that, when it was installed in 2004, made history as the most powerful supercomputer in the world. Since then, Columbia has enabled a wide range of breakthroughs, including the preliminary design of a new launch vehicle that someday will carry astronauts back into space, weather models capable of predicting a hurricane's path up to five days before landfall, and a visualization of gravitational waves created by two colliding black holes.

"NASA's four mission directorates face computing challenges of unprecedented complexity, and these challenges present unique, even monumental compute requirements," said Dr. Rupak Biswas, acting chief of the NAS Division. "Just as Columbia has helped NASA achieve breakthroughs that were previously impossible, this new supercomputer will enable NASA to continue tapping the far limits of science and innovation."

"SGI is proud to supply NASA with its next supercomputer -- a system that will allow NASA to maintain its pioneering leadership in supercomputing," said SGI CEO Robert "Bo" Ewald. "This new SGI Altix ICE system will help the agency carry humankind further into space, better understand the future that awaits our planet, and improve the quality of life for people around the world. We are delighted to extend our collaboration with NASA -- a collaboration that began 25 years ago when NASA became SGI's first customer -- as the agency embarks on its most exciting missions yet."

"Every day NASA makes history, forging a new path in the journey to understand the world and its place in the universe," said Diane M. Bryant, vice president of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group and general manager or Server Platforms Group. "Working with SGI, Intel has ensured that our leading-edge processor architectures serve as the essential engine in creating history. It is exciting to imagine the breakthroughs this remarkable new system will enable, and what those discoveries will mean for all of us."

NASA's new Altix ICE system will be built from highly integrated blades enclosed in 40 racks, each equipped with 512 processor cores and 512GB of memory. Energy-smart and space-efficient, the dense, water-cooled SGI Altix ICE system will allow NASA to minimize its impact on the data center -- in terms of space, energy use and cooling costs. Cost savings aren't the only benefit: Compared to a typical server, a 10TFLOP SGI Altix ICE system can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by up to 293 metric tons every year -- the environmental equivalent of pulling 53 passenger vehicles off the road(1).

The new system complements Columbia because it is especially suited to running applications that decompose into chunks that can be distributed across a supercomputer's many compute nodes, and a fast InfiniBand connection between those nodes guarantees high bandwidth and low latencies. Columbia is a shared-memory system, which means it can apply more memory to a single application and is optimized for problems that benefit most from SGI NUMAlink, the lowest latency interconnect in the industry. For this reason, both of NASA's SGI supercomputers may be used for a single project, depending on researchers' needs and application requirements.

When it is installed, NASA's new supercomputer will be one of the largest SGI Altix ICE systems ever deployed, joining the State of New Mexico's Encanto, a 14,336-core SGI Altix ICE system currently ranked as the third most powerful supercomputer in the world. The new NASA system will run Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10.

For more information on the SGI Altix ICE integrated blade platform, http://www.sgi.com/products/servers/altix/ice/. For information on SGI InfiniteStorage solutions, visit: http://www.sgi.com/products/storage/.

About SGI

SGI (NASDAQ: SGIC) is a leader in high-performance computing. SGI delivers a broad range of high-performance server, storage and visualization solutions along with industry-leading professional services and support that enable its customers to overcome the challenges of complex data-intensive workflows and accelerate breakthrough discoveries, innovation and information transformation. SGI helps customers solve significant challenges whether it's enhancing the quality of life through drug research, designing and manufacturing safer and more efficient cars and airplanes, studying global climate change, providing technologies for homeland security and defense, or helping enterprises manage large data. With offices worldwide, the company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., and can be found on the Web at www.sgi.com.

-----

Source: SGI

Article Tools

Share & Save Options

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCWire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCWire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Feature Articles

'Coopetition' Helps the UK HPC Market Go 'Round

The size and diversity of the HPC market in the United States supports a varied set of system providers and integrators. But in Europe, and the United Kingdom in particular, the market has a different shape.
Read More...

The Week in Review

PRACE to evaluate petaflops prototypes; Acadamic roundtable discusses the computing industry's talent pool; and WRF benchmark data are released. John West recaps those stories and more in our weekly wrap-up.
Read More...

Semantic Supercomputing Reaps Competitive Advantage from Patent Data

Since the first patent was issued for a Venetian statue in 1471, 60 million patents have been awarded around the world, with four million patents actively in force today worldwide. And 800,000 new inventions are registered every year. While the data is public, current search tools are inconvenient and inadequate to the needs of professionals. Semantic supercomputing techniques are helping researchers tackle this difficult challenge.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

25 Years of Conventional Evaluation of Data Analysis Proves Worthless In Practice

Sep 05 | Uppsala University | Swedish researchers are revealing that "intelligent" computer-based methods for classifying patient samples is worthless when it comes to practical problems. Read more...

Three Dimensional Scans Could Revolutionise Brain Surgery

Sep 03 | Telegraph.co.uk | A new form of three dimensional scans could revolutionise brain surgery within a year, doctors claim. Read more...

Marching Penguins: Monitoring Your HPC Cluster

Sep 03 | Linux Magazine | In HPC, most attention is paid to utilization and performance, rather than service availability and problem notification. This article focuses on the latter Read more...

Big Data: Welcome to the Petacentre

Sep 03 | Nature News | What does it take to store bytes by the tens of thousands of trillions? Read more...

UD Scientist Finds Quicker Computer On-Ramp

Sep 01 | Delaware Online | In the world of supercomputer-powered science, speed is everything, and an open road can lead to the promised land. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server for High Performance Computing

Sep 05 | | The excellent scalability features of Linux, in addition to robust security and performance makes it an excellent choice for server systems, especially in the high performance computing area.

“Going Parallel - An Implementation Guide”

Sep 01 | | The paper outlines the basic steps and tools involved in the process of migrating a desktop application to a parallel environment.

Improving Performance and Manageability for Seismic Processing and Imaging Applications with Parallel Storage

Jun 05 | | As pressure increases on the upstream seismic processing community to deliver ever-higher levels of productivity and efficiency, a new generation of storage solutions will be required that allow the maximum utilisation of high-performance computing (HPC) Linux cluster resources, together with the minimum of management overhead.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Video White Paper: Architecting a Better Network Storage Solution

BlueArc's Titan architecture represents an evolutionary step in file servers by creating a hardware-based file system that can scale bandwidth, IOPS, and overall data capacity well beyond conventional software-based devices. With its ability to virtualize a massive storage pool of up to four usable petabytes of tiered storage, Titan can scale with growing data requirements, offering a competitive advantage for businesses, researchers, or other enterprises seeking to better manage data growth while still ensuring optimal performance.

Podcast: Interview with Ben Bennett of ClearSpeed Technology

Today, HPC organizations are requiring substantially more floating point performance to solve real-world problems. In this podcast, Ben Bennett, ClearSpeed General Manager, discusses how acceleration technology can improve the overall performance of standard x86-based systems...