Powered by Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 Processors, Altix Systems to Drive Large-Scale Processing of Data-Rich Climate Codes -- Silicon Graphics today announced that Raytheon Company has selected a range of largescale SGI Altix 4700 systems as computational resources to run mathematical models and computer simulations to help better understand global climate change. The new SGI systems are powered by a total of 1,280 Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 processor 9000 series CPUs (formerly codenamed Montecito) and 5.1TB of globally shared memory. Raytheon selected two 768-core (or 384-processor) Altix 4700 systems and a 1,024-core (or 512-processor) Altix 4700 system. All systems are scheduled for deployment this October as part of an existing contract between Raytheon and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) research and development (R&D) high-performance computing system contract to maintain, operate and upgrade high performance computing platforms. Running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 from Novell, the new systems will serve as large, shared-memory platforms for processing data-rich climate codes that can require up to 500 processors for a single job. The complex models are used to understand the physical processes that may determine global climate changes, and to forecast hurricane tracks. The dual-core Altix 4700 systems will be integrated within an existing SGI high-performance computing (HPC) environment, which consists of singlecore Altix systems driven by 2,656 Intel Itanium 2 processors and more than 5 Petabytes of online tape storage managed by SGI InfiniteStorage Data Migration Facility (DMF). Data for long climate studies is moved off of tape for processing by DMF to a Storage Area Network featuring SGI InfiniteStorage Shared Filesystem CXFS. Raytheon Selects Dual-Core Altix 4700 Systems for NOAA R&D Contract/2 SGI announced its dual-core Altix 4700 systems in June. Ideal for HPC environments with demanding data-intensive workloads, the dual-core Altix 4700 system scales from 8 to 512 CPU sockets (up to 1,024 processor cores) and can accommodate up to 6TB of globally shared memory in a single system while delivering a teraflop of performance in a small-footprint rack. Pricing and Availability SGI Altix 4700 systems are expected to be available in late August of 2006. Altix 4700 system configurations start at less than $75,000. For more information, visit: its Web site.