At ISC Dresden: How to Shorten 'Time to Insight'

In conference sessions and on the exhibit floor, SGI showcases latest trends in remote visualization and acceleration technologies: At the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Dresden (June 17-19, 2008), SGI will highlight groundbreaking high-performance computing (HPC) solutions that will help scientists and engineers alike achieve insights sooner. Exhibit Floor: Accelerator Technologies To achieve dramatic gains in application performance, more users are relying on accelerator technologies, such as floating-point accelerators, FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays), general-purpose compute engines or GPUs (Graphics Processing Units). At Booth D23—D26, SGI will present insights into how these technologies contribute to strategic IT initiatives such as Green IT and Hybrid Computing. Also:
  • In conjunction with Panasas, SGI will present a solution for a parallel file system and storage which tightly integrates the Panasas product with SGI Altix XE and SGI Altix ICE cluster products. On display is the Panasas Parallel filesystem solution serving an Altix XE cluster.
  • From our Visualization business unit, we are demonstrating Opticore RTRT on a visualization cluster with SGI Virtu VN200 visualization node integrated with an SGI Altix XE cluster. The interoperability of the visualization node with the compute cluster, and the seamless operation of the software to do real-time ray tracing, demonstrates the power of the SGI visualization cluster for leveraging the hybrid cpu/gpu power of the SGI Virtu VN200.
  • Intel will present details of its Intel Cluster Ready program.
  • Novell will spotlight its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server platform.
  • An Accelerator Technology Solutions Breakfast, co-sponsored by SGI and Panasas on Friday June 20, 2008 (starting at 7:45 a.m. in conference room 1), will include information on the SGI Accelerator Enablement Program.
  • SGI will also demonstrate SGI Altix ICE — a tightly integrated, cool-running blade solution, and one of several SGI platforms that can accommodate accelerator solutions.

Birds-of-a-Feather Session: Remote Visualization HPC experts needing to visualize and analyze large data sets often work at multiple locations. These distributed work environments present a huge challenge for traditional methods of visualizing numerical simulations. Anders Follin, from the SGI Visualization Business Unit, will present new approaches to powerful, remote visualization in a Birds-of-a-Feather session at 5:15 p.m. Wednesday, June 18, 2008 in Conference Room 4. Hot Seat Session: Success Cases SGI Altix ICE user cases will serve to illustrate the many real-world successes of these latest HPC solutions in a "Hot Seat" session from 6:15 to 6.30 p.m. on Thursday, June 19. Bill Mannel, senior director of the Server Product Group at SGI, will answer questions from the audience of HPC experts at ISC. For more information on ISC, visit its Web site.