AEROSPACE

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA -- SGI (NYSE: SGI) today announced that the world's only 1,024-processor SGI® Origin® 3800 shared-memory supercomputer, located at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., has been upgraded with faster MIPS® R14000A(TM) microprocessors running at 600 MHz. The increased power of the 1,024-processor SGI® machine, the most powerful high-performance computing system used by NASA scientists to date, is part of a NASA computing grid that is delivering more computing cycles to the nationwide scientific community that it serves. The NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at NASA Ames is leading the effort to build and test NASA's Information Power Grid (IPG), a network of geographically distributed supercomputers, large databases and scientific instruments that allow remotely located users access to high-performance computing resources. The 1,024-processor Origin 3800 supercomputer at NASA Ames is a major component of the IPG, currently the largest project at NAS. Part of a joint effort among government, academia and industry, the IPG will help NASA scientists collaborate to solve important problems facing the world in the 21st century. The IPG is part of a worldwide trend toward grid computing designed to foster collaboration between scientists and engineers around the globe to advance science. "The future of high-performance computing will see faster, higher-processor-count supercomputers serving researchers located hundreds or thousands of miles from where the machines are located," said John Ziebarth, NAS chief, NASA Ames. "The leap in computing power from 400 MHz to 600 MHz MIPS processors on the 1,024-processor SGI machine further increases the power of the nodes on the IPG, allowing us and the research community that we serve to tackle some very big data problems in new ways." NASA Ames is using the added processing power for some very demanding high-performance computing research in the areas of aeronautics, earth sciences and life sciences. The 600 MHz MIPS R14000A processors boost the performance of SGI systems by up to 37% on many technical and creative applications used by professionals in the media, government and defense, science, and manufacturing markets. "With the R14000A processors, we have gone from 819.20 GFLOPS to 1228.80 GFLOPS of theoretical peak speed," Ziebarth said. "By scaling our 1,024-processor SGI Origin 3800 supercomputer to this next level of performance, researchers will be able to make unprecedented breakthroughs to advance science more quickly and sustain gigabyte data flows necessary for optimum distributed computing." The overall mission of the IPG is to substantially increase the ability of NASA's scientific and engineering communities to solve problems that depend on the use of large-scale and/or distributed resources. The NAS project team is focused on creating an infrastructure and services to locate, combine, integrate and manage resources from across different NASA centers. In addition to the 1,024-processor Origin 3800 supercomputer at NASA Ames, the IPG taps into SGI® Origin® family high-performance computing systems at NASA's Glenn Research Center and Langley Research Center.