INDUSTRY

Silicon Graphics global shared memory architecture enables industrial, government and university researchers to gain insight into larger data sets than ever thought possible. With 8TB of global shared memory, SGI Altix systems are able to hold entire data sets in memory and eliminate many types of application and system I/O — accelerating scientific research and I/O bound business computing problems. With up to 8TB of global shared memory with as few as 12 processor cores, SGI Altix 4700 systems are enabling applications for a number of important projects: * NASA's SGI Altix 4700 system, installed at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility at Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. in August 2007, was the first supercomputer to operate 2,048 processor cores and 4TB of memory under a single copy of the Linux operating system - by processor count, the largest single system image (SSI) based upon the Linux operating system in the world. * At the Center for Information Services and High-Performance Computing at Technische Universität Dresden (TU Dresden), an SGI Altix 4700 system powered by 2,048 Intel Itanium processor cores and 6.5TB of main memory is enabling researchers throughout Germany to break through information processing barriers in a broad range of disciplines. For example, a team of German researchers is running complex simulations to determine how medical device makers might fuse biological materials with plastics or ceramics to create the ideal hip replacement. TU Dresden's system has enabled over a 100 fold speedup in running complex simulations, with a large eddy simulation that used to take more than three months, completing overnight on the SGI Altix 4700 system. * The Institute for Molecular Science in Japan uses a 512-core SGI Altix 4700 system with 6TB shared memory and a 128-core SGI Altix 4700 with 2TB shared memory. Because of SGI's scalable architecture, both systems can be attached and create an 8TB global shared memory environment. * SGI Altix systems with 4TB to 8TB of memory are also being used to develop advanced reservoir simulation applications and models which can increase the fraction of discovered oil that can be recovered — extending their life by many years and increasing their value by billions of dollars. "With 8TB of global shared memory on the SGI Altix 4700, scientists and engineers around the world are able to boost productivity by integrating theory, simulation and experimentation more closely than every before," said Michael Brown, director of server and visualization marketing at Silicon Graphics. "With 8TB of global shared memory, scientists, engineers and businesses can solve problems that are 4x larger than on the largest systems from IBM and HP, and 8x larger than the largest systems available from Sun. This allows developers to link multi-disciplinary applications that operate on different scales to create more complete pictures of their work — gaining invaluable insights that lead to breakthrough results."