The Naval Research Lab announced in early December that they are partnering with SGI on DOD’s large data initiative:
…the Large Data Joint Capability Technology Demonstration (LD JCTD) will demonstrate remote access, manipulation, and viewing of very large commercial and government data sets (petabytes to exabytes) designed to increase joint warfighter situational awareness.
Lots of federal-esque turns of phrase in there.
The essence of what they are deploying is SGI Altix XE boxes running dual-core Intel® Xeon® processors and dual-core SGI Altix 450 and 4700 blade servers running Itanium 2 processors. Storage is based on a petabyte of DataDirect Networks hardware with YottaYotta on top.
Other technology partners in the project include Archivas, SilverStorm Technologies, and Voltaire.