SGI To Supply NASA's
Next Major Supercomputer
(6 May 2008) 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 visualisation 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 minimise its impact on the data centre -- 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 optimised 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.
SGI
SGI is a leader in high-performance computing. SGI
delivers a broad range of high-performance server, storage and visualisation
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 aeroplanes, studying global
climate change, providing technologies for homeland security and defence, or
helping enterprises manage large data. With offices world-wide, the company is
headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif.
(1) Emission Facts: Greenhouse Gas
Emissions from a Typical Passenger Vehicle" (EPA420-F-05-004 February
2005).
(source: SGI)
