SCIENCE

SGI today announced that Madison Research Corporation (MRC) installed a 128- processor SGI Altix 3700 Bx2 supercomputer at the US Army Space and Missile Defense Command (SMDC)/US Army Forces Strategic Command (ARSTRAT) Simulation Center which supports research and development of defensive missile systems. Shipped in June, the new Altix system will support research conducted at the Simulation Center that will ultimately help to defend the United States, its deployed military forces, and allies from long-range missile attacks. MRC is the prime contractor that operates the Simulation Center on behalf of SMDC/ARSTRAT. "The SGI Altix 3700 Bx2 supercomputer is the latest addition to the Center's high performance computing resources and represents a significant technology update supporting our community of HPC users," said Larry Burger, director for SMDC's Future Warfare Center. "One capability pertinent to our M&S and RDT&E users of the Altix 3700 is its global shared-memory system architecture, which allows fast access to all data in the system's memory directly and efficiently, without having to move data through I/O or networking bottlenecks." Applications that run on the Altix are simulations, computational fluid dynamics, computational chemistry, and data and systems analysis. Scaling to 512 Intel Itanium 2 processors and up to 6 Terabytes of global shared memory in a single platform, the Altix 3700 Bx2 is SGI's newest and most powerful Linux solution for high performance computing. Altix 3700 Bx2 leverages the powerful SGI NUMAflex global shared-memory architecture to derive maximum application performance from new high-density CPU bricks. The latest configuration also doubles available bandwidth between Altix bricks with SGI's NUMAlink 4 interconnect technology-the industry's fastest at 6.4GB/sec and less than 1 microsecond MPI latency. On top of the inherent reliability features that are built into the Intel Itanium 2 processors, SGI builds reliability into each of the modules in the Altix 3700 Bx2 system. Power supplies and cooling fans are N+1 redundant and can be replaced without system downtime in the event of failure. The SGI Altix 3700 diagnostic controller subsystem reports intermittent errors and recommends preemptive remedial action to on-site or remote service personnel. The SGI Altix 3700 Bx2 supercomputer was purchased in June with funding from the U.S. Department of Defense's High Performance Computing Modernization Program and the U.S. Missile Defense Agency.