DEFENSE

SGI today announced that the U.S. General Services Administration, Federal Technology Service, on behalf of the Department of Defense (DoD) High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP), has purchased an SGI Altix supercomputer to help the United States military maintain its technological supremacy over its adversaries in weapon systems design. The Aeronautical Systems Center (ASC) Major Shared Resource Center (MSRC) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, has enhanced their computing power with the recent installation of a 2,048-processor SGI Altix supercomputer that will: aid weapon systems design of innovative materials; advance design concepts; improve and speed modification programs; increase high fidelity simulations; and enable more efficient tests and evaluations. Named "Eagle" by the ASC MSRC and part of the DoD HPCMP's Technology Insertion for fiscal year 2005 (TI-05), the Altix supercomputer is powered by 2,048 1.6 GHz Intel Itanium 2 processors, 2TB of memory, the SGI NUMAlink interconnect, and 128TB of disk. The entire 2TB of memory is globally addressable by any processor in the system, which will run the Linux(R) operating system and support the Intel C, C++, and Fortran compilers. This latest system expands ASC MSRC's SGI supercomputing capability to more than 4,100 processors spread across five separate shared memory SGI systems. During a test run at SGI's manufacturing facility in Chippewa Falls, Wisc., the new system achieved Linpack benchmark performance of 11.636 Tflop/s (trillions of calculations per second) while operating at over 90 percent efficiency. "SGI's technology enables the Department of Defense to develop next- generation weapon systems that allow the U.S. to maintain a technological advantage over our adversaries," said Benn Stratton, National Director of Defense & Civilian Agencies Business Unit, SGI Federal. "Our high-performance computing technology today is creating new ways for the Department of Defense to achieve military advantage and warfighting superiority on the 21st century battlefield. This massive shared-memory system from SGI allows the DoD to simulate entire aircraft, entire weapon systems, and entire battlefield engagements, with fidelity not possible before now." "In our efforts to serve more than 1,000 researchers throughout the DoD, we needed a supercomputer with industry-leading capability, scalability, production quality, ease of use, and the ability to handle massive amounts of data," said Steve Wourms, director, ASC MSRC. "SGI has had a presence at Wright-Patterson for almost 20 years. This is the latest example of SGI's unique ability to take state of the art, market-leading trends, such as the Linux operating system and Intel Itanium 2 CPUs, and make it easy to use for engineers who aren't computer scientists. This SGI Altix supercomputer at the ASC MSRC will help power groundbreaking research and development for the DoD weapon systems of the future." The increased performance and scalability provided by this Linux-based SGI supercomputer will help put advanced technology in the hands of U.S. forces more quickly, less expensively and with greater certainty of success. The SGI Altix system will not only meet the high performance computing requirements of the ASC MSRC but will also greatly benefit the broad user base of scientists and engineers across the HPCMP Centers who are driving the nation's scientific and engineering research and development. The SGI Altix family of servers and supercomputers are the most scalable Linux systems on the planet, designed to meet the requirements of scientific, engineering and creative users in the government who require record performance, unparalleled value, and industry-leading 64-bit Linux solutions to keep pace with the growing demands of government applications. In the government's Linux high-performance computing environment, tradeoffs are constantly being made between scaling up and scaling out. With SGI Altix servers and supercomputers, government technical users have the flexibility to do both. Based on a robust production-ready Linux environment and Intel Itanium 2 processors, the award-winning SGI Altix computing architecture allows both clustering (scaling out) of individual nodes and scalability (scaling up) of each node from 4 to 512 processors sharing up to 4TB of physical memory.