SGI Announces New Opportunities for Industrial and Research Customers

Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) said that its global shared memory architecture enables industrial, government and university researchers gain insight into larger data sets.

 

The SGI Altix 4700 system comes equipped with up to 8TB of global shared memory enabling it to hold entire data sets in memory with as few as 12 processor cores, according to company officials. In addition, the system also eliminates many types of application and system I/O. This enables applications for a number of projects, according to company officials.

 

The projects include NASA’s SGI Altix 4700 system that was installed at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility at Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California in August 2007.

 

While at the Germany based Center for Information Services and High-Performance Computing at Technische Universitat Dresden (TU Dresden), SGI Altix 4700 system is enabling researchers to break through information processing barriers in a broad range of disciplines.

 

SGI Altix 4700 system is powered by 2,048 Intel (News - Alert) Itanium processor cores and 6.5TB of main memory, officials said.

 

In Japan, the Institute for Molecular Science is using a 512-core SGI Altix 4700 system with 6TB shared memory and a 128-core SGI Altix 4700 with 2TB shared memory.

 

Officials said that both systems can be attached and create an 8TB global shared memory environment due to SGI's scalable architecture.

 

Additionally, the SGI Altix systems featuring 4TB to 8TB of memory are also being used to develop advanced reservoir simulation applications and models.

 

The 8TB of global shared memory enables scientists, engineers and businesses to solve problems that are 4x larger than on the largest systems from IBM (News - Alert) and HP, and 8x larger than the largest systems available from Sun, said Michael Brown, director of server and visualization marketing at Silicon Graphics.

 

This enables developers to link multi-disciplinary applications, which operate on different scales, to create complete pictures of their work, said Brown.

 

With the help of 8TB of global shared memory on the SGI Altix 4700, scientists and engineers around can “boost productivity by integrating theory, simulation and experimentation more closely than every before,” said Brown.