AUSTIN, Texas, Nov. 17 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Supercomputing 2008,
Booth 1009 -- With its sights set on colonizing the moon and eventually
sending astronauts to Mars, NASA is calling on researchers to solve some of
the most complex science and engineering problems in history.
Key to that effort is Pleiades, the world's third fastest supercomputer,
installed at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility at NASA Ames Research
Center in Mountain View, Calif. The 51,200-core SGI(R) Altix(R) ICE 8200EX
system from Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) (Nasdaq: SGIC) is capable of
generating a theoretical peak of 609 trillion operations per second
(TeraFLOPS).
Today, Pleiades made its debut on the Top500 list (www.top500.org) with
demonstrated performance of 487 TeraFLOPS on the LINPACK benchmark. The
results make Pleiades the world's most powerful general-purpose supercomputer.
Pleiades offers researchers unprecedented resources for a range of
projects in support of all of NASA's mission directorates, though most of the
work, at least initially, is expected to support the development of NASA's
next-generation space fleet. Known as Project Constellation, the manned space
exploration effort will involve years of sophisticated, high-fidelity
scientific and engineering studies, from virtually testing re-entry vehicle
options to designing safety systems.
Researchers will even use Pleiades to simulate catastrophic failures --
specifically so they can design systems and procedures to prevent problems
that might threaten the safety and survival of astronauts.
Pleiades supplements Columbia, the 14,336-core SGI(R) Altix(R) system that
debuted in 2004 as the world's second-fastest computer. Columbia helped NASA
successfully resume its Space Shuttle program while saving millions of hours
of research time on many other projects.
"With Pleiades, we can do six times the work that we could on Columbia,"
said Rupak Biswas, acting chief of the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS)
Division. "Now our researchers are making their projects as large and complex
as they need, without having to compromise simulation completeness or fidelity
to make room or time for other projects. We're already seeing real
productivity benefits that will help keep Project Constellation and other NASA
research initiatives on schedule."
"For 50 years, no one has looked farther or reached further than NASA,"
said Silicon Graphics CEO Robert "Bo" Ewald. "We were proud to count NASA as
our very first customer more than a quarter century ago, and we are just as
proud today to supply the agency with Pleiades -- the supercomputer that will
help usher in the next great age of space exploration."
"To witness the state of the art in supercomputing, organizations need
look no further than Pleiades," said Richard Dracott, General Manager of High
Performance Computing at Intel. "This powerful system leverages the
scalability and energy efficiency of Intel(R) Xeon(R) processors and the
rapidly deployable, high-productivity SGI Altix ICE platform. Intel
congratulates NASA and Silicon Graphics for once again making history with a
supercomputer that not only will help shape our future here on Earth, but will
fuel our exploration of new worlds that await our discovery."
Additional Information:
-- Pleiades has more than doubled in power and capacity since this summer,
when Silicon Graphics and NASA installed the system's initial 40 SGI(R)
Altix(R) ICE racks. The rapid expansion resulted from a joint effort by NASA,
Silicon Graphics and Benchmark Electronics.
-- Today, 100 SGI Altix ICE racks have been installed, giving researchers
access to 12,800 Quad-Core Intel(R) Xeon(R) 5300 Series processors, 50
Terabytes (TB) of memory, 900TB of SGI(R) InfiniteStorage 15000 InfiniBand
RAID arrays, and a 115TB SGI(R) InfiniteStorage NEXIS NAS solution. Pleiades
runs SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
-- In producing Pleiades, Silicon Graphics partnered with Mellanox
Technologies to create the world's largest InfiniBand (IB) cluster with more
than 12,800 end-point nodes,(1) connected via more than 20 miles of double
data rate IB cables. The Pleiades system's IB interconnect is more than 70
percent larger than the next two largest systems combined.(2) In total, it
supports over 128TBits/second of simultaneous, nearest-neighbor IB
communications bandwidth.
-- Pleiades is Silicon Graphics' largest deployed SGI Altix ICE system --
3.5 times larger than any other SGI Altix ICE installation. It comprises a
total of 6,400 dual-socket computational blades, which were developed,
produced and deployed in partnership with SuperMicro Computer, Inc.
-- Earlier this month, NASA achieved rapid productive deployment when it
turned the bulk of Pleiades (32,000 cores) over to users for full-time,
productive research. This followed months of rigorous testing, during which
NASA maintained multiple environments so researchers could use between 4,096
and 14,000 cores for production work, while administrators tested the Lustre
filesystem, the InfiniBand interconnect fabric, and other components.
-- In addition to Constellation Program projects, NASA is using Pleiades
to model the evolution of galaxies, refine visualization methods for the V-22
Osprey Tiltrotor aircraft, and conduct complex calculations to determine how
life first originated on Earth.
Silicon Graphics, Inc.
Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) (Nasdaq: SGIC), is a leader in
high-performance computing. SGI delivers a complete range of high-performance
server and storage solutions along with industry-leading professional services
and support that enable its customers to overcome the challenges of complex
data-intensive workflows and accelerate breakthrough discoveries, innovation
and information transformation. SGI solutions help customers solve their
computing challenges whether it's enhancing the quality of life through drug
research, designing and manufacturing safer and more efficient cars and
airplanes, studying global climate, providing technologies for homeland
security and defense, or helping enterprises manage large data. With offices
worldwide, the company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, and can be
found on the Web at www.sgi.com.
Note: SGI corporate phone numbers have changed. The new main number for
SGI corporate headquarters is 408-524-1980. Effective immediately, all numbers
featuring the 650 area code are no longer in service.
(C) 2008 SGI. All rights reserved. SGI, the SGI cube, Altix and the SGI
logo are registered trademarks of SGI in the United States and/or other
countries worldwide. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in
several countries. Intel, Xeon and Itanium are trademarks or registered
trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and
other countries. Novell is a registered trademark, and SUSE is a trademark of
Novell, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks
mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.
Editor's Note
(1) Dual-plane interconnect results in two IB end-points per compute blade
plus storage nodes
(2) The Pleiades IB interconnect is 70 percent larger than those utilized
by Los Alamos National Laboratory Roadrunner and the Texas Advanced Computing
Center
MEDIA CONTACT
Marla Robinson
marlar@sgi.com
256.773.2371
SGI PR HOTLINE
408-524-2810
