George Ou from ZDNet has been at the SC07 supercomputing convention in Reno, USA, and has been chatting to NASA and SGI. He’s had a closeup look at examples of SGI’s Altix 4700 single system image (SSI) monster, as well as SGI’s Altix ICE 8200 cluster.
Some interesting numbers and some good closeup pictures – slide on over to http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=864 and have a look.

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RENO, Nev., Nov. 14 — “HAWK,” the largest and most powerful computer in the Department of Defense (DoD), has achieved new heights of application scalability for a DoD system by running a single application across 9,000 processor cores. More significantly, the feat was achieved only a few weeks after the system was delivered.
An SGI Altix 4700 system from SGI, HAWK was successfully deployed ahead of schedule at the Aeronautical Systems Center Major Shared Resource Center (ASC MSRC) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. The supercomputer is powered by 9,216 Intel Itanium 2 processor cores and features 20TB of globally addressable memory and 440TB of usable disk space. The application-scaling breakthrough was achieved using advanced software codes that study the characteristics of turbulence. Dr. George Vahala, professor of physics at The College of William and Mary, ran a combination of Lattice Boltzmann and quantum turbulence codes on HAWK over a period of several weeks. A number of Vahala’s runs utilized all available 9,000 cores.
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RENO, Nev., Nov. 14 — SGI today unveiled SGI InfiniteStorage NEXIS 9000 NAS, a new platform for extracting high performance from file-based storage and gaining in storage consolidation efficiencies. Efforts made by SGI to develop new storage technologies have pushed scalability, file directory size, and performance to levels needed to support accelerating data growth related to business, scientific, and digital media applications. SGI InfiniteStorage NEXIS NAS solutions greatly simplify shared storage and give organizations the ease of an appliance in terms of initial installation, automated asset discovery and day-to-day management. The newest addition to the family — the SGI InfiniteStorage NEXIS 9000 NAS — also pushes data throughput to new levels. Large scientific, education or enterprise teams can now consolidate multiple departments on a single NAS platform and increase bandwidth to address demanding performance requirements.
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RENO, Nev., Nov. 12 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Supercomputing 2007 —
SGI (Nasdaq: SGIC) today unveiled new cluster nodes and processor upgrades
aimed at increasing the performance of SGI(R) Altix(R) XE clusters while
maintaining their ability to deploy quickly, consume power efficiently, and
help keep data centers running cooler.
SGI is extending its Altix XE line of servers and clusters with two new
models powered by next-generation 45nm Intel(R) Xeon(R) Processors: the
Quad- Core Intel Xeon 5400 Series “Harpertown” and Dual-Core Intel Xeon
5200 Series “Wolfdale.”
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SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 12 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Companies needing
business analysis for applications such as revenue protection, social
network analysis, fraud detection, Web analytics, biometrics, RFID and
complex event processing can now achieve at least an order of magnitude
improvement in application performance with a landmark, memory-centric,
energy-efficient computing solution from FedCentric Technologies, an SGI
(Nasdaq: SGIC) and Oracle Value Added Reseller. The FedCentric MCDB
Accelerator solution will be demonstrated at Oracle OpenWorld, November
11-15 at the Moscone Center West Booth #3424 in San Francisco.
Powered by SGI(R) Altix(R) 4700 or SGI(R) Altix(R) 450 servers, the
FedCentric MCDB Accelerator solution uses in-memory database technology to
provide significant improvement in response time and throughput over
traditional disk-based systems.
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