eWeek Europe is reporting today that the UK Computational Cosmology Consortium (COSMOS) in Cambridge is one of SGI’s latest UV 1000 customers.
Stephen Hawking, who heads up that consortium, had this to say
“Recent progress towards a complete understanding of the universe has been impressive, but many puzzles remain,” said Hawking. “Cosmology is now a precise science, and we need supercomputers to calculate what our theories of the early universe predict and test them against observations of the present universe.”
Remember the UV 1000 is the big version of SGI’s Xeon-based shared memory machine. The UV will replace COSMOS’ current Altix 4700. According to SGI there is more to the buy than just hardware
Altix UV meets COSMOS’s requirements for high performance, scalable, big-memory supercomputing to facilitate vast amounts of data analysis. SGI is collaborating with COSMOS so that Altix UV, with its ease-of-use and rapid time-to-solution, begins contributing to research findings as quickly as possible. Collaboration efforts include: code porting to the Altix UV platform, applications knowledge transfers between SGI engineers and COSMOS users, parallel programmer support and end-user training. SGI engineers will also provide dedicated support to COSMOS researchers in strategic projects, following the Altix UV installation.
I’ve sent in for word on the size of the machine.
[…] week we covered news that the research consortium headed by Stephen Hawking was upgrading to an SGI UV 1000 system. […]