9k core SGI deployed ahead of schedule in DoD

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According to a release posted during SC07 this week, the DoD’s latest super is big, and was deployed ahead of schedule. This is a rare bit of good news in the DoD, where deployments of large scale systems are often plagued by schedule slips and delays caused by system deployment problems.

SGI logoAn SGI Altix 4700 system from SGI, HAWK was successfully deployed ahead of schedule at the Aeronautical Systems Center Major Shared Resource Center (ASC MSRC) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. The supercomputer is powered by 9,216 Intel Itanium 2 processor cores and features 20TB of globally addressable memory and 440TB of usable disk space.

…”Increasingly, our customers are saying that they can no longer wait six months to a year before their new HPC systems are commissioned for production use,” said Dr. Eng Lim Goh, senior vice president and chief technology officer, SGI. “Given the pace of Moore’s Law, such delays can sacrifice a significant portion, sometimes as much as a quarter, of an HPC system’s lifecycle. More importantly, these delays have also been known to adversely affect an agency’s time to produce results, consequently decreasing the agency’s capabilities or competitiveness.”

Disclosure: I work for the Defense program that funds the ASC MSRC and purchased this system.