GOVERNMENT

Demand for robust HPC environment and ready access to data prompts latest investment in SGI solutions: NASA has turned to SGI for a large-scale high-performance computing (HPC) cluster and storage solution to support computational work essential to aeronautics research. Within its Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate (ARMD), NASA faces rapidly escalating demand from scientists for computer time and associated resources to store and manage the results of their computational analyses. To meet that need, the agency acquired an SGI Altix ICE blade system powered by 4,096 Intel Xeon processor cores and 4 Terabytes (TB) of memory. NASA also purchased a new SGI InfiniteStorage 10000 solution capable of managing 240TB of data -- an amount three times larger than the entire print collection of the Library of Congress. Scientists and engineers at NASA's ARMD pursue fundamental and advanced research in an effort to transform America's air transportation system and to support future air and space vehicles. ARMD research projects often require tens of thousands of processor hours and data volumes can reach multiple terabytes. This combination puts enormous pressure on computing and storage resources, particularly as projects grow increasingly complex, and new projects are added to ARMD's mission. "Whenever we can find ways to either shorten the time it takes for researchers to see results or to increase the level of fidelity of our simulations, we can speed the pace of discovery," said Juan J. Alonso, Director of the Fundamental Aeronautics Program at NASA. "The SGI Altix ICE system makes thousands more processor cores available for research, and will be especially useful for running simulation codes that are optimized for distributed cluster architectures. Meanwhile, our InfiniteStorage 10000 environment ensures that even the largest data sets won't create a bottleneck for users." SGI expects to install the solution at Silicon Valley's NASA Ames Research Center in late September. Because SGI Altix ICE comes pre-installed with all system software and cluster management tools, both SGI and NASA officials anticipate the new environment will be fully productive in a short period of time. This latest acquisition of SGI compute technology adds nearly 4,100 more processor cores to NASA's existing 10,240-core Columbia system. Also, this month NASA will install a 2,048-core SGI Altix 4700 supercomputer, the world's largest system to operate under a single instance of Linux. All three systems run SUSE Enterprise Linux 10 from Novell. New heights of space- and power-efficiency The new SGI solution addresses NASA's need to provide more compute and storage resources while minimizing their impact on the data center. Both the SGI Altix ICE and SGI InfiniteStorage 10000 platforms feature exceptional density, so the new systems require a minimum of floor space. The InfiniteStorage 10000, for instance, can scale to 480TB of SATA drives in a space covering just slightly more than two floor tiles. The SGI solution also helps NASA conquer the challenges of soaring electric and cooling expenses. SGI equipped SGI Altix ICE with an energy-smart power architecture that realizes more than 90 percent efficiency on its 12-volt DC front-end power supply, up to 87 percent efficiency on compute blades, and up to 76 percent efficiency at the rack level. NASA's Altix ICE systems also take advantage of SGI's new, third-generation water-cooled door design. Chilled water running through the unique hinged door carries away up to 95 percent of the heat generated by the system, thus easing the burden of cooling NASA's data center. SGI will integrate the storage solution with the Lustre cluster file system, administered and powered by 10 SGI Altix XE 240 servers, with meta data storage handled by an SGI InfiniteStorage 220 system.