ACADEMIA

First Phase of Multi-Year Deployment to Help Scientific Community Solve The Most Challenging Problems of Our Time: Ushering in a new future for Germany's scientific community, German officials have inaugurated a powerful new supercomputer equipped with systems from SGI. The North German Supercomputing Alliance (HLRN) maintains the new system in two separate cities, Berlin and Hanover. Both sites have installed identical SGI supercomputers, and although they are located 155 miles apart, they can be combined to attack large-scale problems via a high-speed network. Those problems include complex simulations and data-intensive processes in physics, materials research, computational fluid mechanics, astrophysics, chemistry, and earth sciences. Known as HLRN-II, the combined SGI installation:

• Today provides 13 times more computing capacity than its predecessor from IBM, installed in 2002, even though the SGI system is only in its first phase of deployment
• Features a total of 5,824 Intel Xeon processor cores and 15.8 Terabytes (TB) of memory
• Is built from twin SGI Altix ICE systems, integrated SGI Altix XE 1200 clusters, and 1.15 Petabytes (PB) of SGI InfiniteStorage 4600 RAID arrays
• Includes a fully integrated Infiniband and 10 Gigabit Ethernet network infrastructure, parallel file system, and cluster management and monitoring suite designed specifically for HLRN-II and implemented by SGI Professional Services

When the second phase of the project is completed at the end of 2009, HLRN-II will be more than four times as powerful as it is today, generating an anticipated peak performance of 312 trillion operations per second (Teraflops). Meanwhile, HLRN's choice of energy-efficient SGI solutions will minimize the system's environmental impact on operation centers in Berlin and Hanover. "Having started the conceptual design process only four months ago, the first phase of HLRN-II will soon be available to scientists," said Prof. Gabriele von Voigt, managing director of the Regional Computer Centre of Lower Saxony, where the Hanover half of HLRN-II is located at Leibniz University's Regionales Rechenzentrum für Niedersachsen (RRZN). "Researchers working at northern Germany's state-run facilities will use this resource to tackle some of the most challenging problems of our time." The Berlin half of HLRN-II is located at Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum für Informationstechnik (ZIB). "We are eager to see how our scientists will turn the increased computing power of HLRN-II and its ability to manage vast amounts of data efficiently into groundbreaking new insights," said Prof. Alexander Reinefeld, director of Computer Science at ZIB. "A world-class high-performance system requires optimized applications to achieve extraordinary results, so the first step is for our consultants to help the users in adjusting their codes in engineering, earth sciences, physics and computational chemistry." Both systems are connected via "HLRN Link," a network-based environment that provides researchers with a shared, massively parallel computing system with common access to enormous amounts of data. Using HLRN Link, researchers can also store and manage the immense volumes of data needed to generate ever-larger scientific models and simulations. To achieve this HRLN-II has increased its total SGI InfiniteStorage infrastructure by another 1.15 Petabytes, and will double that capacity in 2009. "Around the world, society has tasked scientists with improving quality of life by rapidly finding new insights and discoveries to provide reliable solutions to some of our most daunting problems. HLRN provides the scientist with a world-class high-performance computing environment in support of their research," said Robert Übelmesser, Managing Director of Silicon Graphics GmbH in Germany. "Not only are SGI systems designed to help researchers achieve new breakthroughs, but they also enable data centers to lower their energy consumption and cooling costs. With SGI, customers like HLRN achieve the highest performance while minimizing their environmental impact."