SCIENCE

SGI announced that a new SGI high performance computing (HPC) system has been selected by CSC to meet National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) requirements for weather and climate forecast modeling. This system will be installed in NOAA's Environmental Security Computing Center in Fairmont, West Virginia.

NOAA is the federal agency focused on examining the condition of the oceans and the atmosphere. From climate monitoring to providing daily weather forecasts and severe storm warnings, NOAA's products and services support the country's economic vitality and affects more than one-third of America's gross domestic product. Their dedicated scientists use cutting-edge research and high-tech instrumentation to respond to the demands of citizens, planners, emergency managers and other decision-makers asking for timely and reliable information about our changing environment.

The NOAA Research system will consist of a 36 rack SGI Altix ICE 8400 enhanced hypercube supercomputer cluster containing 27,648 cores of 6-core, 32 nm Intel Xeon 5690 processor series with over 6PB of storage capacity. Altix ICE is an HPC-optimized server design with integrated InfiniBand switch blades for highest throughput, performance and reliability. The open architectural design of the Altix ICE system enables the utilization of the most current standard components, such as x86 processors, Ethernet, InfiniBand, and off-the-shelf Linux operating system. As a result, the system runs all x86 certified applications without any changes or the need for a compatibility layer. Further, the Altix ICE platform is capable of economically scaling from a half-rack to 100s of racks and is the core component to the largest InfiniBand cluster in the world, delivering petaflop performance.

"NOAA provides science-based information about our environment to help people make informed decisions in their lives, businesses and communities," said SGI CEO Mark J. Barrenechea. "SGI is proud to support CSC and NOAA to enable their mission with the most advanced supercomputer technology available today."

"We selected SGI for this major HPC deployment based on the company's proven history of high performance, and the unparalleled computer power that this system will provide to NOAA researchers," said Steve Baxter, program manager at CSC.