ACADEMIA

SGI today announced that Imperial College London, one of the UK’s most prestigious educational establishments, has selected SGI Altix ICE 8200 EX, a Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) solution, to add to its central high performance computing (HPC) service.

Consistently rated among the world's best universities, Imperial is a science-based institution with a global reputation for high quality teaching and academic research. Imperial College required an advanced computing solution for students and researchers to conduct course work and research that depend on extremely complex process modeling. The college selected the SGI dual-rail Infiniband supercomputer, Altix ICE 8200 EX, which uses the latest Intel Xeon Nehalem processors.

The SGI installation will act as Imperial’s high-end HPC system, providing a central service to handle all study and research applications common to HPC academia, such as computational fluid dynamics, and weather and ocean modeling. The new system also acts as a stepping stone to the national academic supercomputer service HECToR (High End Computing Terascale Resources).

“Due to the complex nature of the target applications, speed, performance and low latency are critical factors for our HPC users,” said Simon Burbidge, HPC coordination manager at Imperial College London. “The new SGI installation has proven to perform very well across these attributes and will enable researchers at the university to tackle larger, more difficult problems than ever before.”

SGI will provide dedicated in-house application expertise to Imperial College London as part of the technology partnership to help port and optimize key codes onto the new SGI architecture.

“Imperial College London is at the absolute forefront of technological development and scientific understanding,” said Rod Evans, vice president of sales for Northern Europe at SGI. “Altix ICE will help drive its academic research to new levels with highly reliable, extremely energy efficient and scalable hardware, allowing them to continually evolve their HPC capabilities.”

SGI Altix ICE supercomputers are designed-to-order for data-intensive computing. Featuring integrated blade architecture, Altix ICE supports extremely high densities – up to 512 processor cores in a single rack – and is easily scalable to thousands of nodes, making it an ideal solution for the most challenging computing problems. In addition, the Altix ICE blade architecture offers unique technologies like diskless nodes and integrated backplanes, which not only enhance reliability, but reduce operating costs by reducing power expended for cooling.