INDUSTRY

Larger, More Complex Simulations Done on SGI Altix and InfiniteStorage Systems Reduce Expensive Physical Experiments and Labs Costs: The need for high-performance computing has been growing at a very fast pace at Idaho National Laboratory (INL), the U.S. Department of Energy's lead lab in developing the next generation of more efficient, safer nuclear power plants. INL doubled its aggregate computing capability over the last year via the purchase of a strong complement of high-performance computing and data storage and management technologies systems, and the acquisition of a high-performance SGI Altix 4700 system from SGI was a key part of this advance. The SGI system, which will be used for a variety of nuclear energy and security applications, will enable INL to substantially increase productivity and save money. "Our compute capacity expansion is driven by the needs of our high priority programs and by price/performance considerations," said Paul Meakin, a Laboratory Fellow and Director of the Center for Advanced Modeling and Simulation, Idaho National Laboratory. "In the long term, we're going to have to develop better nuclear fuel cycles and design new nuclear reactors, and other components; all require computation. Developing these systems, and conducting experiments, particularly with highly radioactive material, is extremely expensive. By doing simulations in conjunction with and before, physical experiments, the savings will far outweigh the cost of the hardware, the software and personnel. The addition of SGI technology is part of our commitment to satisfy the computational needs for these key programs." INL's acquisition of a high-performance SGI Altix 4700 system was made in response to researchers' requests to run much larger simulations more efficiently and more cost effectively via shared-memory computing with a variety of compute-intensive chemistry, computational fluid dynamics and atmospheric codes in the Linux operating environment. To complement its computing power, INL's purchased 9.6 TB of SGI InfiniteStorage 4000, a multi-purpose RAID system designed with versatility in mind. By deploying INL's critical information on an InfiniteStorage 4000, researchers can decrease management overhead while improving data accessibility speed and protection. "The fact that the Altix is Linux-based is important to us because Linux has become an industry standard operating system in high-performance computing," said Eric Whiting, HPC System Architect, Idaho National Laboratory. "The commercial code we use is well-supported on Linux, and well-supported and optimized on the SGI Altix. One of the desirable characteristics of the 4700 is the large amount of shared memory. At this lab, we have several Linux clusters running very successfully; the clusters are fine for certain scientific codes. But there's a lot of code that runs much better on a system with a large amount of shared memory and a large number of processors. The 4700 is a good complement to our other resources." "Idaho National Labs' installation is a prime example of how SGI solutions excel in the most demanding compute and data-intensive workflows," said Michael Brown, sciences segment manager, SGI. "The flexibility, scalability, and globally shared-memory architecture of the Altix system delivers the right combination of high performance compute, special purpose processing, memory and I/O elements, to meet the U.S. Department of Energy's distinct computing needs, and complements the scale-out capabilities of the SGI Altix XE cluster or those from other vendors." INL also chose an SGI Altix 3700 system with SGI RASC (Reconfigurable Application Specific Computing) technology. SGI's RASC technology uses Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to improve performance of routine algorithms and allow scientists to explore the latest innovation in programming technology. The SGI Altix 3700 system also employs graphics capabilities used for the design of control and security systems for nuclear power plants. Idaho National Labs has three major research divisions all utilizing SGI technology: Science and Technology, National and Homeland Security, and Nuclear Programs. The divisions use the SGI Altix 4700 to run a wide variety of codes. Gaussian and quantum chemistry codes run fundamental research relevant to the new nuclear fuel cycles that are needed for the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP). GNEP, part of President Bush's Advanced Energy Initiative, encourages expansion of domestic and international nuclear energy production while minimizing proliferation risks and reducing waste volumes and radioactivity of spent nuclear fuel before disposal in a geologic repository. Computer-modeling simulations for security applications employ Allegra and ABAQUS software, and the SGI Altix 4700 system is ideally suited to run these I/O intensive and memory-bandwidth intensive applications. Optimized for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) applications and currently running STAR-CD and Fluent, the SGI Altix 3700 integrates both SGI RASC technology and graphics for CFD work, which impacts nuclear research and development. SGI servers and storage solutions deliver scalability and high performance in a cost-effective package. In use for over six months, Idaho National Laboratory has an SGI Altix 4700 system with 96 Intel Itanium 2 processors running Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise 9; an SGI Altix 3700 with four ATI graphics cards powered by 24 Intel Itanium 2 processors; and a 9.6TB direct-attached SGI InfiniteStorage 4000 system