ACADEMIA

SGI announced full support for the newest Intel Xeon processor E5-2400 and E5-4600 product families. With a strong relationship and over ten years of technology collaboration resulting in numerous innovative high performance computing advancements, SGI is incorporating the newest Intel Xeon processor E5-4600 into SGI's future shared memory platforms with many new, unique capabilities. The Intel Xeon processor E5-2400 is now the base processor in the SGI Hadoop Starter Kits and is available in the SGI Rackable product line for use in other applications.

"Intel's decade-long close collaboration with SGI has resulted in countless improvements in performance and power efficiency of HPC solutions being employed by many of the world's leading research facilities and businesses," said Raj Hazra, IAG vice president and general manager Technical Computing Group, Intel. "SGI has taken advantage of Intel's new Xeon processors to deliver highly differentiated products with unprecedented speed and scale for applications ranging from HPC to business intelligence and data warehousing, including Big Data, Simulation, Analytics and beyond."

The world's largest and fastest scale-up computer -- A Big Brain system

SGI's next generation coherent shared memory platform for high speed data-intensive computing, the SGI UV, will be based on the Intel Xeon E5-4600 processor family. Users will be able to take advantage of significant performance improvements while enjoying simplified administration, consolidation of applications and ease of development, all due to a single system image scaling to thousands of cores and many terabytes of memory versus alternatives which require hundreds of nodes. The system is completely open, running standard Intel x86, standard Linux, and off-the-shelf applications and middleware, all while maintaining high efficiency and uptime.

The SGI UV system once again beats the existing world records for SPECjbb2005 (record total throughput) and SPECompL2001, with a 58% improvement in SPECompL2001 from the previous generation based on Intel Xeon E7 processor family. The SGI next generation shared memory platform has also achieved top 64 socket Intel Xeon E5-4600 benchmarks for SPECint_rate_base2006 and SPECfp_rate_base2006(1).

This system will allow users to solve their most demanding problems with fast, scalable performance operating at up to 64 terabytes of memory and with up to 4096 cores in the world's largest coherent shared memory single-instance system, providing the fastest path to results for complex multi-terabyte problems including simulation and modeling, fraud prevention, threat detection, drug discovery, weather and climate modeling, genomics and computational chemistry and physics.

Organizations such as Stephen Hawking's COSMOS Consortium, based at the University of Cambridge, have already committed to this platform to continue to drive cosmology research in Britain.

"The collaboration with SGI will enable researchers using the COSMOS supercomputer across the UK to advance their ambitious programme of research in both cosmology and exoplanets," said Professor Paul Shellard, director, Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge. "The incredible flexibility and scalability of this next-generation shared memory high performance computing solution from SGI accelerates our work exploiting large data sets and tackling complex simulations."

"Big Data is characterized not just by its volume but also by its velocity and variety. Moreover, Big Data can be in either structured or unstructured forms. These dynamics give rise to a broad range of demands made on a computer system, especially for high performance and comprehensive analytics," said SGI CTO Dr. Eng Lim Goh. "Our long design relationship with Intel and the incorporation of the more robust Intel Xeon E5 processors, have enabled us to develop the next SGI coherent shared memory platform that scales up even higher, in compute, memory and IO, than our previous generation. The result is a system ideally suited to meet this broad spectrum of existing and emerging Big Data challenges."

Scale-out for Big Data getting a boost

SGI has been one of the leading suppliers of large-scale, high performance Hadoop clusters to both large commercial enterprises and key government agencies. These systems enable companies to unlock the value from their Big Data, the semi-structured and unstructured data that typically accounts for 80% of the data in any organization.

SGI Hadoop Starter Kits include all required hardware and software, all ready to go, making it simple to set up a proof of concept and scale quickly to datacenter-ready production systems. SGI Hadoop Starter Kits are now based on the new Intel Xeon processor E5-2400 processor and offer a 22% increase in price/performance ($/TPM) and a 27% increase in performance/watt (TPM/Watt), as compared to the previous reference implementation based on the Intel Xeon Processor 5600 series. Together with software from Cloudera and select analytics partners, SGI Hadoop clusters now deliver even greater performance, short time-to-production, and along with SGI shared memory platforms and storage systems, provide end-to-end solutions for large-scale data management.

Availability

SGI product models with full support of Intel Xeon processor E5 will be available this quarter.