ACADEMIA

SGI announced that NASA has selected its next generation SGI ICE high performance computing (HPC) platform, code-named 'Carlsbad 3.0,' to extend the computational capability of NASA's Pleiades supercomputer system. The expansion will take place in the first quarter of 2012, and will include the latest Carlsbad 3.0 infrastructure, power and cooling technology, future Intel Xeon processor E5 Romley family, and an FDR dual-plane, hypercube-topology InfiniBand network.

Under the terms of a Space Act Agreement, NASA continues to work with SGI and Intel to increase the computational capabilities for research, modeling and simulation work at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., with the ultimate goal of attaining 10 petaflops of peak performance.

"The unique architectural design of the SGI ICE platform allows us to expand the system without downtime, saving us precious compute hours as we increase and adapt system size to NASA's evolving missions," said Rupak Biswas, division chief at NASA Ames Research Center.

"NASA is synonymous with pushing the boundaries of exploration, scientific research, and technology development," said Mark J. Barrenechea, chief executive officer of SGI. "SGI is delighted to partner with NASA as they advance their supercomputing platforms to meet their mission needs."

The new system will be integrated into the Pleiades supercomputer, currently ranked the #7 most powerful HPC system in the world based upon the Top 500 list published in June 2011. The augmentation will consist of over 1,700 compute nodes with 32 GB/node, thereby adding approximately 35% to the peak capability of Pleiades in early 2012.

"Intel and SGI are working closely together to make sure that leading customers like NASA have the performance, density and programming efficiency they need to deliver on key multi-petascale workloads leading up to the exascale era," said Rajeeb Hazra, general manager of the High Performance Computing division at Intel. "We're excited that NASA selected the fifth generation of SGI's award-winning ICE system for the next stages of Pleiades expansion."