ACADEMIA

Silicon Graphics today at the 85th American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting announced that the First Institute of Oceanography (FIO), one of the research institutes under the State Oceanic Administration (SOA) in Qingdao, China, has installed a new SGI Altix supercomputing system from SGI for its ocean environment research project. The SGI Altix 3700 system powered by 32 Intel Itanium 2 processors and with 32GB global shared memory was installed and has been in full operation since September. The new supercomputing resource is used to simulate the ocean environment, ocean airflow and computation of short-term numeric global ocean data changes. As one of the top labs in Marine Science and Numerical Modeling, FIO conducts various research projects including ocean circulation and global climate change, regional ocean science studies, oceanic information systems and oceanic biology. In order to generate more accurate and long-range forecasts of ocean weather and conditions, researchers apply increasingly sophisticated and complicated mathematical models. These calculations require the very high performance compute power and high I/O of the Altix system to run the new generation of ocean wave model code and real-time environment numerical modeling simulation. "Since data about the ocean environment is very difficult to acquire and often interrupted by the variation of ocean weather, to achieve the real-time simulation and monitoring, it requires high intensive computation in a specific given time period. The Altix supercomputer's shared-memory and scalable architecture combined with the 64-bit Linux OS deliver the real-time performance required for this type of work. Altix delivered 30% higher performance on our internal application benchmarks than other systems we tested," said Mr. Liu Hai Xing, the project leader of the Marine Science and Numerical Modeling. Mr. Liu Hai Xing continued, "We could not run our new wind wave modeling code with our older systems due to system overloading and bandwidth limitations. Now with the computational power and I/O capabilities of the new Altix system, we don't worry about such bottlenecks when running our ww6 internal code. "With the outstanding performance we are seeing in the lab, we are confident that our cutting-edge research facility will deliver breakthrough discoveries in oceanography for China and the world." "The study of marine science and global climate change is one of the biggest challenges and most important issues facing the world in the 21st century. We are excited that First Institute of Oceanography, Under State Oceanic Administration (SOA), one of the top environmental research organizations in China if not the world, is using SGI technology for their world-leading marine science research," said Alex Lee, president, SGI China. "For more than two decades, SGI's core competencies of HPC, storage and visualization have been keenly aligned with the development of meteorology and environmental sciences in the world and have helped in accelerating research progress, fueling innovation and discovery in many disciplines. We believe this unique combination of SGI technology and leading marine scientists will ultimately lead to faster and more successful marine science research in China." "SGI helps scientific and creative customers solve the world's most complex computational problems. These customers want the highest performing platform, which is what the Intel Itanium 2-based computing system provides," said Lim, Sang Chong, Director of Enterprises Platform Group, Asia Pacific, Intel.