The LANL Institutional Computing project, the Climate, Ocean, and Sea Ice Modeling Project (DOE Office of Science) and the Advanced Simulation and Computing program (National Nuclear Security Agency) selected the SGI Altix XE clusters to increase LANL’s HPC computing resources in the Laboratory’s open computing environment. Each of the two nearly identical Altix XE clusters provides about 50 teraflops and 14 terabytes of memory with over 4,500 processor cores. The first cluster is already delivered and is being integrated into LANL’s existing Turquoise network infrastructure that supports institution-wide unclassified scientific research and the ASC Predictive Science Academic Alliance Program.

“SGI is thrilled to help LANL continue to play a leading role in world-class science and research,” said Dr. Eng Lim Goh, senior vice president and CTO at SGI. “SGI’s high performance servers address mixed workload and compute capability requirements, and will provide the powerful boost the lab’s advanced research team needs to meet and exceed its critical goals.”

Built with Intel Xeon 5500 processors, Altix XE offers high performance, extensive memory and enhanced storage capacity, and delivers excellent reliability and breakthrough energy efficiency with features that optimize power and system cooling.

“LANL’s research requires top-notch computing and infrastructure for processing massive amounts of data,” said Andy White, deputy associate director of the Theory, Simulation and Computing Directorate at LANL. “We have had excellent experience in the past with SGI systems and are pleased to be deploying systems and working with them again to provide the computing resources required to support our important research initiatives.”