SGI Unveils 2 New Supercomputers, Management Software

SGI unveiled two new supercomputers and high-performance computing (HPC) management software at SC14.

SGI’s new sixth-generation ICE XA supercomputer is a highly scalable and energy-efficient system that runs Linux and is powered by Intel’s latest Xeon E5-2600 v3 processors. The distributed-memory supercomputer can leverage Intel’s Xeon Phi coprocessors or GPU accelerators from Nvidia to increase the system’s performance and hold  down power consumption. Energy efficiency is further pushed by SGI’s second-generation E-cell warm water cooling technology, which offers at least a 30 percent increase in cooling efficiency compared with competing technologies.The system, which also uses InfiniBand interconnects, can scale to tens of thousands of nodes and hundreds of thousands of cores running Red Hat Linux or SUSE Linux. SGI’s UV 300 and UV 30EX in-memory supercomputers are aimed at data-intensive workloads and also run Linux. The four-socket systems run Intel’s Xeon E7-8800 v2 chips, can leverage the Xeon Phi coprocessors and Nvidia GPUs, and offer up to 3TB of in-memory computing power.

We believe exascale is the next frontier in high-performance computing and will enable computational breakthroughs spanning climatology, energy, security and at the speed of human thought,” SGI President and CEO Jorge Titinger said in a statement. “SGI is on a path to deliver systems capable of an exaflop by 2020. While these systems will be designed for the most extreme HPC environments, our progression will bring practical solutions to tera- and petascale problems seen today.”

 The Management Center 3.0 software is part of SGI’s larger Management Suite, and offers such capabilities as automatically provisioning operating systems across compute clusters, provisioning power at the node level and recording time-stamped histories for analysis to help organizations be more proactive in ensuring system performance.
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