The SC07 Cluster Challenge was held in conjunction with the SC07 conference in Reno, Nevada. The event sought to create an exhibition and competition in which teams of undergraduate students would compete in a demonstration of talent, technology and accessibility of entry-level supercomputing. The activity was intended to highlight the gains in hardware performance, ease of use of clusters and the power and availability of simulation software.
To whet peoples’ appetites, the Cluster Challenge Committee challenged that a half rack of a modern cluster would be competitive with the number one system on the TOP500 from only 10 years ago! In fact, the top Linpack score realized in the Challenge was 420 gigaflops, which would have made the TOP500 list only three years ago. This announcement was made during the TOP500 BoF session at SC07 and was met with loud cheers and applause from the attendees.
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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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sgi, altix 4700, altix ice 8200, sc07, itanium, intel, supercomputer

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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sgi, silicon graphics, altix, linux, xeon, harpertown, wolfdale, supercomputer