NCSA announced this week that it is making ready to deploy a new 16 TFLOPS SGI Altix UV (the x86-based successor to the company’s Itanium-based shared memory Altix platform) on the National Science Foundation’s TeraGrid

“There has been a clear increase in the demand for shared memory resources,” said TeraGrid Forum chairman John Towns, whose persistent infrastructure team at NCSA will deploy and support Ember. “Allocation requests for shared-memory systems have consistently exceeded the available resources—by as much sevenfold in a recent review of requests—and have been followed by a series of results highlighted in TeraGrid publications. We know Ember will be an essential tool for science and engineering research.”

…Ember will be composed of SGI Altix UV systems with a total of 1,536 processor cores and 8 TB of memory. The system will have 170 TB of storage with 13.5 GB/s I/O bandwidth. Ember will be configured to run applications with moderate to high levels of parallelism (16-384 processors).