AEROSPACE

Silicon Graphics today announced that NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center is upgrading its computing and data management capabilities with powerful SGI Altix servers and SGI InfiniteStorage solutions. With the new SGI systems providing a platform for new and more powerful ways to analyze environmental data, Goddard engineers can leverage the latest codes from NASA to achieve a faster time-to-solution. Among the first projects scheduled for Goddard's new SGI resources is an initiative to reanalyze 30 years of Earth weather and climate data captured by satellites. Goddard's dramatic expansion of computational capability and data management technology will allow engineers to sift through and recalculate decades of information to arrive at more accurate conclusions and more in- depth insights about changes in the Earth's climate since the 1970s. "NASA was SGI's very first customer in 1982, and since then the agency and its scientific missions have helped us repeatedly push the limits of computing, visualization and storage technology," said Bob Bishop, chairman and chief executive officer, SGI. "Today's announcement is an excellent indication of what long-term strategic private-public partnerships can achieve." In a purchase completed earlier this month, the Maryland-based NASA facility acquired an additional compute and storage solution incorporating 3 SGI® Altix® 3000 systems with a total of 1,024 Intel Itanium 2 processors and 2TB of global shared-memory, and the ability to store and manage another 200 trillion bytes, or terabytes (TB), of data with an SGI InfiniteStorage storage area network with the SGI InfiniteStorage shared filesystem CXFS. To assess the NASA center's computing needs, SGI began collaboration in January with Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), which oversaw leasing and integration. Among other key vendors in the collaboration are Altair Engineering, Inc., which integrated the PBS Professional workload management solution for Altix and InfiniteStorage deployment; DataDirect Networks, which provided networked technology support for the InfiniteStorage solution; and Intel Corp., which provides the scalable Intel Itanium 2 processors that drive SGI Altix systems. Each of these companies contributed to the final solution, the first components of which will be delivered to Goddard by early summer. SGI computing, visualization and storage solutions are particularly well suited to scientific applications, due in large part to SGI's third-generation NUMAflex architecture. This unique global shared-memory architecture enables researchers to hold entire data sets in memory, allowing for faster and more interactive data analysis, and resulting in more incisive conclusions. SGI's data storage and management is also enhanced with CXFS, the industry's fastest shared filesystem for storage area networks. CXFS cuts time to solution by eliminating file duplication and the time it takes to move large files over networks.