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Dallas, Texas — The Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) based in Columbus, Ohio has announced the first installation of an Intel Itanium processor-based prototype system from SGI. The initial configuration is a Linux cluster of four nodes, with two pre-release Intel Itanium processors per node, and a Myrinet interconnect. The system will be used for porting parallel scientific and engineering codes to the Itanium processor platform.
Implementation of the cluster was very successful – the SGI system was up and running within just two hours, with applications running seamlessly across the cluster. Today the machines are being used by OSC staff to familiarise themselves with the new system and next month the facility will be open to a restricted number of academic researchers across the OSC community who will start to port and optimize their applications. This installation will allow these early adopters to take best advantage of the Itanium architecture for production runs of their applications when the systems reach production.
“This test system represents the beginnings of what will be a second generation of Linux clusters for production HPC installed at OSC. The project is joint research between OSC and SGI to investigate the feasibility of using Linux clusters in place of traditional MPP systems for a diverse set of engineering and scientific problems,” Al Stutz, Director of High Performance Computing at OSC said.
Raghu Murthi, Marketing Director of Enterprise Platforms at Intel commented, “OSC is an example of the earliest adopters of Itanium processor platforms. We believe that the floating-point performance, scalability, and large memory addressability of the Itanium processor will demonstrate the power of the platform for HPC applications.”
Ken Jacobsen, VP of ISV partner programs at SGI commented, “We are delighted to have delivered one of the first Itanium processor based systems to be installed in a major supercomputing center. This collaborative effort with OSC once again demonstrates SGI’s leadership in high performance computing. Using SGI’s Pro64 compiler technology, we expect that OSC users will be able to raise the performance levels of Linux clusters to new heights for HPC applications.”
About OSC
OSC, a state-supported resource, provides a reliable high performance computing and networking infrastructure for a diverse, state-wide/regional community including education, academic research, industry, and state government. Additional information is available at http://www.osc.edu
About Intel
Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, is also a leading manufacturer of computer, networking and communications products. Additional information about Intel is available at www.intel.com
About SGI
SGI provides a broad range of high-performance computing and advanced graphics solutions that enable customers to understand and conquer their toughest computing problems. SGI is headquartered in Mountain View, California the company is located on the Web at http://www.sgi.com
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