ACADEMIA

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. and AMSTERDAM, Netherlands -- SGI today announced that the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) will upgrade its current SGI Origin 3000 infrastructure with an additional SGI Altix 3000 system powered by 416 Intel Itanium 2 processors and 832GB of memory. The system will be installed at SARA Computing and Networking Services (the Dutch National HPC and Networking Center). NWO and the Netherlands Computing Facilities Foundation (NCF), which are responsible for the selection, acquisition and use of the Netherlands' national supercomputer, are committed to providing the most advanced computer systems to Dutch scientists and engineers. With the Altix(TM) system, researchers can operate at the cutting edge of advanced fundamental and applied scientific research with the largest SGI Altix 3000 supercluster to date. Supercomputing applications running at SARA, which provides services to researchers throughout the Netherlands in a grid environment, include climate research, medical science, water management and water quality calculations, fluid dynamics and turbulence modeling, computational chemistry, and genomics, including bioinformatics. Utilizing SARA's existing 1024-processor SGI Origin 3000 server, bioinformatics researchers last year began an NCF-sponsored grand challenge project comparing more than 400,000 proteins extracted from several organisms, a task requiring over 520,000 CPU hours so far. The addition of SGI Altix 3000 systems to the National Supercomputer Service will further advance such scientific research. All of these research applications benefit significantly from global shared memory, for which the SGI Altix 3000 system is uniquely equipped. The installation of the new system is scheduled to begin next month. SGI(R) technology has powered cutting-edge scientific research at SARA for more than 10 years. The Itanium 2 processor-based Altix shared-memory system, running a standard Linux(R) OS on each of its 64 processor nodes, will be integrated with SARA's existing 1024-processor SGI Origin 3000 server, which is based on MIPS(R) processors and the SGI(R) IRIX(R) OS. Key to efficiently operating this integrated HPC environment is the Platform Computing LSF suite of batch scheduling tools. SARA has long been using the SGI clustered filesystem, CXFS(TM), to share data seamlessly across the entire workflow. CXFS enables all systems in a storage area network (SAN) to access all data on that SAN without a data transfer wait time or the added expense of storing and administering multiple copies of data. In a typical HPC environment, CXFS can increase workflow productivity by five times or more compared with traditional data sharing methods. SARA will include the Altix system in its CXFS network, taking advantage of the CXFS filesystem's ability to share data across all major operating systems, including IRIX, Solaris(TM), Windows(R), AIX(R) and Linux. The integration of these powerful technologies forms a high-performance solution enabling SARA to remain at the scientific computing forefront. "The Netherlands' public and private sectors alike are committed to conducting fundamental and applied scientific research at the highest levels. Continuous improvement of a national supercomputer and researcher access to such an important resource is crucial if we are to realize this goal," said Professor Peter Nijkamp, chairman, NWO. "In 1999, SARA chose the SGI Origin 3000 family for its functionality and applications performance, and we now add the newest generation of SGI machines to fulfill the constant demand for additional computational capacity." "SARA has an insatiable demand for the highest levels of integrated compute, visualization and storage capabilities," said Bob Bishop, chairman and CEO of SGI. "We are delighted to be their chosen collaborator in pushing the frontiers of science."