SGI Opens European Research Centre at ICHEC in Ireland

Today SGI announced a significant investment in extreme scale software research at the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC), a top European center. The investment highlights the commitment of SGI to the European software research community. These resources, including SGI application software and supercomputing hardware expertise, will assist scientists as they explore issues related to climate change, weather forecasting, and environmental research among many other topics.

Video: Matching the Speed of SGI UV with Multi-rail LNet for Lustre

Olaf Weber from SGI presented this talk at LUG 2016. “In collaboration with Intel, SGI set about creating support for multiple network connections to the Lustre filesystem, with multi-rail support. With Intel Omni-Path and EDR Infiniband driving to 200Gb/s or 25GB/s per connection, this capability will make it possible to start moving data between a single SGI UV node and the Lustre file system at over 100GB/s.”

NASA Boosts Pleiades Supercomputer with Broadwell CPUs and LTO Tape

NASA Ames reports that SGI has completed an important upgrade to Pleiades supercomputer. “As of July 1, 2016, all of the remaining racks of Intel Xeon X5670 (Westmere) processors were removed from Pleiades to make room for an additional 14 Intel Xeon E5-2680v4 (Broadwell) racks, doubling the number of Broadwell nodes to 2,016 and increasing the system’s theoretical peak performance to 7.25 petaflops. Pleiades now has a total of 246,048 CPU cores across 161 racks containing four different Intel Xeon processor types, and provides users with more than 900 terabytes of memory.”

Managing Critical Data with SGI’s New Zero Watt Storage

Today SGI announced Zero Watt Storage, a powerful extension to its SGI DMF data management platform designed to meet growing customer demands for managing critical data. This solution was developed by SGI to offer its DMF customers fast, disk-based access to their near line data that significantly outperforms cloud storage in terms of costs and access speed up to 5X.

SGI Powers Energy Research at UFRJ in Brazil

The Federal University of Rio de Janeiro is embarking on ground-breaking energy research powered by a new SGI Computer. The high performance computing system will be installed through the SGI valued partner, Versatus HPC.

DDN Opens New Techology Center in Paris

DDN has opened a research and development center in Paris, in response to strong demand the French market and across Europe for high-performance big data storage solutions. DDN’s Newly Created Research and Development Centre, located in the Meudon area of Paris, will develop advanced end-to-end data lifecycle management technology, and a local technical presence for its European customer base – increasing scope for innovation and collaboration.

Review of the SGI Management Suite

Properly managed HPC supercomputers can deliver sustained Return on Investment for production supercomputing. To ensure ongoing operations are at peak efficiency, system management capabilities should not only include system monitoring and configuration tools, but also workload management, automated power capping, and error and fault detection capabilities.

Video: Discovering the Origin of Stars Through 3D Visualization

This visualization from David Ellsworth and Tim Sandstrom at NASA/AMES shows the evolution of a giant molecular cloud over 700,000 years. It ran on the Pleiades supercomputer using the ORION2 code developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It depicts how gravitational collapse leads to the formation of an infrared dark cloud (IRDC) filament in which protostars begin to develop, shown by the bright orange luminosity along the main and surrounding filaments.

SGI to Power 1.9 Petaflop Supercomputer at University of Tokyo

The University of Tokyo has chosen SGI to perform advanced data analysis and simulation within its Information Technology Center. The center is one of Japan’s major research and educational institutions for building, applying, and utilizing large computer systems. The new SGI system will begin operation July 1, 2016. “The SGI integrated supercomputer system for data analysis and simulation will support the needs of scientists in new fields such as genome analysis and deep learning in addition to scientists in traditional areas of computational science,” said Professor Hiroshi Nakamura, director of Information Technology Center, the University of Tokyo. “The new system will further ongoing research and contribute to the development of new academic fields that combine data analysis and computational science.”

Supercomputer Power Management

Today’s HPC supercomputers have significant power requirements that must be considered as part of their Total Cost of Ownership. In addition, efficient power management capabilities are critical to sustained return on investment.