PSC has an early access SGI UV

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SGI announced today that the’ve been secretly exercising the soon-to-be released UV box at none other than Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. Regular readers and industry wags will recall that PSC and SGI had a public spat after Mark Barrenechea and his band of merry men took over SGI and walked away from a deal that PSC had been working with them as part of a petascale NSF bid. This put PSC in a nasty position without a large scale machine to carry it forward — a position they are still in, though the center’s other systems are yet providing value to users of the Teragrid.

Evidently SGI threw PSC a bone and gave them early access to the hardware and software they were denied in their NSF bid

SGI logoSince the beginning of February 2010, PSC has been working to build and run important applications in climate, weather, chemistry, materials science and physics using Altix UV. The center has also tested kernels representing unique applications in graph-based informatics, an area in which Altix UV is expected to excel. Ongoing work at the center will target additional high performance computing (HPC) applications, including biology and astrophysics.

“PSC is pleased to have had early access to Altix UV,” said Dr. Nicholas Nystrom, director of Strategic Applications at PSC. “Early results are compelling; Altix UV is living up to its promise as a highly productive, performance-oriented, shared memory supercomputer, ideal for PSC’s very advanced applications.”

Through close collaboration with SGI engineering, PSC has successfully accomplished runs on up to 512 cores. PSC is also studying in-depth performance analysis of Altix UV and exploring Altix UV’s potential for implementing high-productivity programming models.