NASA builds world's largest shared memory system

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SGI and NASA announced this week that the agency is acquiring an SGI Altix as part of its four phase procurement to replace Columbia, NASA’s earlier giant cluster of SGI machines.

SGI logoNASA’s new SGI Altix system is expected to be installed in August at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at the Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. The new system will be the first supercomputer to operate 2,048 processor cores and 4TB of memory under a single copy of Linux-creating the largest Linux single system image (SSI) in the world.

The system is loaded with 1,024 Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 processors and complemented by a new 240TB SGI InfiniteStorage 10000 system for storage.