CLOUD

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- SGI and SCICOR, an authorized SGI Solution Provider, today announced that the National Cancer Institute's Advanced Biomedical Computing Center (ABCC) in Frederick, Md., has purchased from SCICOR an SGI(R) Altix(TM) 3000 server, which was put into production last month. The new SGI Altix system, which contains 64 Intel(R) Itanium(R) 2 processors and runs the open-source Linux(R) operating system, will serve as an important scientific computational resource that is part of a growing list of SGI servers supporting the nation's preeminent scientists at NCI and the National Institutes of Health. Unlike some other high-performance computing centers, ABCC is focused exclusively on supporting research directed toward biological problems. Whether modeling anti-cancer drug interactions with known tumor targets or analyzing genomic data, biomedical researchers can greatly benefit from the breakthrough capabilities of the SGI Altix 3000 family of servers, which deliver record-shattering performance and scalability running a 64-bit Linux(R) OS in demanding computing environments such as the biosciences. The SGI Altix 3000 family, fueled by the first high-performance Linux environment capable of scaling to 64 processors in a single node, represents a remarkable leap forward for scientists, biomedical researchers, programmers and other users of advanced technical computing systems. Advances of Altix 3000 systems include the ability to scale up to 64 processors and 4TB of memory in a single cluster node and to share memory globally across nodes, potentially involving hundreds of processors. The resulting combination delivers breakthrough performance and reduces the time and resources required to run such applications as AMBER(R) and Gaussian(R), which are critical to research conducted at ABCC. "For bioinformatics applications requiring large shared memory, large file support, or high code portability, the SGI Altix 3000 is the ideal combination of high-performance computing and industry-standard open source software, and should complement other bioinformatics platforms at the ABCC," said Thomas Stanley, national director of civilian agencies, SGI. The new 64-processor SGI Altix system increases the computational power of the ABCC, which already includes eight 8-processor SGI(R) Origin(R) 300 servers and one 64-processor SGI(R) Origin(R) 3800 server installed at the center. The Altix server is connected to the ABCC Portable Batch System (PBS) Pro cluster, a workload and resource management system that includes the nine existing SGI servers at the ABCC. In addition, those computing systems that are part of the PBS cluster will have access to nine terabytes of shared disk space on two SGI(R) TP9400 Fibre Channel RAID arrays, the highest performance RAID storage subsystem in its class. This disk space is shared as an SGI(R) CXFS(TM) clustered filesystem, the industry's fastest shared filesystem, which eliminates file duplication and the time necessary to move large files over the network.