ACADEMIA

SGI announced that its innovative new SGI ICE X high performance computing (HPC) platform has $90 million in orders under contract, reflecting the strongest and broadest customer interest of any new product introduction in the company's history. The ICE X family was introduced at the Supercomputing 2011 show in Seattle in November 2011.

"We're thrilled about the success we've seen to date with the SGI ICE X platform," said Tony Carrozza, executive vice president of field operations at SGI. "In addition to deals we've won outright, our pipeline continues to grow. Customers around the world love the flexibility and compute power in a small footprint, all delivered based on industry standards, and they are voting with their orders."

SGI ICE X is the fifth-generation of the award-winning SGI ICE platform, and builds upon the solid base that has achieved nearly 100% customer satisfaction ratings in recent surveys conducted by SGI among its many ICE customers. Able to scale from tens of teraflops to up to tens of petaflops, SGI ICE X is the most flexible supercomputer in the industry for addressing a wide range of applications and customer needs.

"IDC expects that over the next few years more HPC buyers will be looking for systems with higher performance capabilities beyond what is available in standard products," said Earl Joseph, program vice president, High Performance Computing at IDC. "The newest design of the SGI ICE platform, based on the next generation Intel Xeon processor E5 family, fits well with the needs of these demanding customers to achieve new levels of speed and scale in their compute workloads. ICE X is a flexible, performance-oriented design that should fit well into these customer requirements."

SGI ICE X continues the heritage of previous ICE designs, including the SGI ICE 8400, in implementing hierarchical management and hypercube networking topologies. This allows easy system expansion over time, including over multiple generations, with no system down time while the expansion is taking place. This feature saved NASA over two million hours of compute time during a previous system upgrade.