CLOUD

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA -- SGI (NYSE: SGI) today announced the completion of an upgrade installation at the National Supercomputer Centre (NSC), Linkoping, Sweden, that will expand the SGI® Origin® 3800 supercomputing system at NSC to 128 500 MHz R14000(TM) processors and 128GB of memory. The NSC, a unit of Linkoping University, provides supercomputing services to government, academia and industrial corporations across the country. "Demand for the 96-processor SGI Origin 3800 system and its shared-memory resources has been overwhelming since its installation in 2000," explained NSC Director Matts Karlsson. "The machine has been oversubscribed many times over the past year, which is the primary reason for this upgrade. "We have a demand for shared-memory computing that cannot be filled by any cluster-based platform today. Several of our clients use only shared memory, and the Origin 3800 system has been a very good production machine for them and us." Shared-memory systems can be used to model very large simulations without breaking the model up into smaller pieces; all parts of the supercomputer work on the same large model simultaneously. In clusters, programmers must break up the model into a great many smaller pieces, with each processor working on only its own piece and with exchanges of information between processors taking place intermittently. The SGI® NUMAflex(TM) architecture of Origin 3800 gives the NSC extreme scalability, flexibility and investment protection by replacing the system bus typical of symmetric multiprocessing compute servers with a shared-memory concept. The unique NUMAflex approach enables NSC to grow its Origin 3800 system to any desired performance level using modular building blocks, or bricks. The addition of bricks increases the bandwidth and I/O throughput of the entire system. The NUMAflex architecture enables processors to utilize available memory from other bricks at very low latency, increasing I/O throughput and system bandwidth. As a result, the Origin 3800 server, installed in the early summer, provides NSC clients with the highest possible performance levels from their industrial and scientific applications. CPU time on the Origin 3800 system, which includes approximately 2TB of disk storage, is requested by clients through a national allocations committee. Currently, SAAB Aerospace uses approximately one-third of the available computing time for military and commercial aircraft research and design. The Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, which provides local, national and regional weather forecasts for the entire country, uses another third of the system's processing time to run its forecasting systems, including the Swedish Regional Climate Modeling Program. Academic users account for the rest of the processing time and use the system primarily for chemistry, physics, geoscience, astronomy and engineering applications. Biochemistry research is the largest single academic use of the system. "This provides yet another example of various groups across a broad range of missions finding that they need the power and flexibility that SGI offers," said SGI's Chodi McReynolds, director, Industry Marketing, Sciences. "With SGI, they can invest in an open, flexible architecture that allows them to upgrade and add on as needed, saving time and money with little or no interruption. We are pleased to work with NSC to fill their clients' computing needs."