DEVELOPER TOOLS

From developing new rocket fuels to understanding how lightning strikes affect a passenger jet, researchers in Alabama are experiencing revolutionary breakthroughs in productivity with a group of mid-range servers and high-performance storage solutions from Silicon Graphics. With the new SGI technology, the Alabama Supercomputer Authority (ASA) provides more than 100 times the computational capacity of its previous supercomputer for a broad range of demanding scientific applications. To drive a new generation of scientific discovery at universities, institutions and corporations throughout Alabama, the Alabama Supercomputer Center (ASC) acquired five SGI Altix 350 systems totaling 56 processors and 106GB of memory. Installed in September at the ASC in Huntsville, the combined cluster of Altix 350 systems encompasses the power to generate 280 billion calculations per second. "With the Altix 350 systems, we've seen significant performance improvements that will cut the time to discovery for our researchers and push the edge of science in Alabama even further," said Randy Fulmer, CEO, ASA. "The Altix systems provided an easy transition from our previous supercomputer, which means scientists can focus on their research instead of worrying about how to make their code run on a new platform. The resulting computing environment makes the vast majority of users more productive." The research conducted on the new SGI systems cuts across a broad spectrum: -- Chemistry studies involve work with high-energy materials that might one day be employed in new rocket fuels or explosives. -- Wavestream mediation studies are looking into how scientists can chemically treat radioactive waste. -- Bioinformatics researchers are working to better understand viral mechanisms in hopes of treating deadly viruses, while others are studying protein behaviors for future drug design and developing breakthrough computational fluid dynamics calculations to better understand fluid flows through human nasal passages and lung branches -- Atmospheric scientists are refining weather and hurricane prediction techniques, and researchers in astronomical physics are modeling what happens when galaxies collide, and electrical engineers are analyzing the impact of lightning strikes on aircraft. Three of the mid-range Altix 350 servers, each powered by 16 Intel Itanium 2 processors and incorporating a 64-bit Linux operating environment, serve as compute engines for research projects. A total of 48GB of memory from those systems can be made available for large compute problems. A six-processor Altix 350 system serves as the administrative front-end for researchers tapping into the compute engines. A generic cluster would have introduced unnecessary complexities for researchers who depend on ASC resources. "Looking at the type of science conducted by our user community, it made more sense to deploy three 16-processor Altix systems than to try to make things work with dozens of generic boxes lashed together in a sprawling cluster," said Wayne Whitmore, chief operating officer, ASA. "With the Altix systems, we can address most of our research on any single 16-processor system, and then scale across all three systems when we need to. Altix is much easier to administer than a generic cluster, and we still have the global shared-memory architecture to use to our advantage." High-Performance Storage and Filesystems The center also turned to SGI for solutions to manage its dynamic and rapidly growing inventory of scientific data. SGI InfiniteStorage Shared Filesystem CXFS gives the Altix 350 systems instant and shared access to all data without the overhead of traditional network data access protocols. Using CXFS to share a 4 Terabyte SGI InfiniteStorage TP9300 Storage Area Network means ASA researchers never have to wait for data, and administrators have only one data copy to store, manage, back up and restore. "For our environment, a shared filesystem is a must," said Whitmore. "SGI's storage solutions offered the expandability and speed we required. For instance, we recently had a 1.2 terabyte section of CXFS serving as a scratch disk to throw out temp files as the system was running. That's the kind of I/O we're generating on a daily basis, which makes CXFS and InfiniteStorage such an ideal solution." Growing increasingly popular within technical computing environments in a broad range of markets, SGI Altix 350 mid-range servers leverage the built-in SGI NUMAflex architecture, which dramatically reduces the time and resources required to run technical applications by managing extremely large data sets in a single shared-memory space. For the first time, more complex data sets and complete workflows can be driven entirely out of memory, enabling productivity breakthroughs that traditional clusters or enterprise-class UNIX servers can't achieve. SGI InfiniteStorage is a complete line of scalable, high performance storage solutions that are available with SGI IRIX OS-based SGI Origin and 64-bit Linux OS-based SGI Altix family of servers. SGI InfiniteStorage solutions also support Solaris, AIX, Windows, 64- and 32-bit Linux, and Mac OS X systems and other UNIX platforms. High-performance storage arrays, including the SGI TP9000 series available with Fibre Channel drives or Serial ATA, tape libraries and network storage devices are also available from SGI. Additional information on InfiniteStorage solutions is available at www.sgi.com/products/storage/. SGI's popular shared filesystem for storage area networks (SANs), CXFS enables multiple computers running different operating systems -- SGI IRIX, Windows, 32-bit and 64-bit Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris -- to simultaneously access the same file at local or near-local disk speeds. CXFS also provides massive scalability, throughput, availability, ease of management and low total cost of ownership for storing, accessing and managing data in a high-performance, multiplatform Storage Area Network (SAN) environment. CXFS improves data workflow by providing customers the performance and scalability of a SAN with the file sharing and connectivity of network-attached storage, addressing two fundamental challenges in data management: fast access to information and seamless integration of multiple operating systems. Availability SGI Altix 350 systems are available today in configurations of four to 16 processors per system, with clustered configurations scaling to thousands of processors. Additional Altix 350 system technical and availability information is posted on www.sgi.com/products/servers/altix/.