SC09 kicks off next week in the US, and SGI has been dropping hints about a big product announcement coming up.

There’ll be the usual pimping of the latest lines from their product range:

Octane™ III, SGI’s personal supercomputer, ICE Cube™ modular data center, CloudRack™ scalable workgroup clusters, SGI® Altix® ICE departmental server, and SGI® InfiniteStorage hardware and software products.

I’m hoping the new shiny bit of kit is going to be a line of Xeon based Altix gear, but we shall see:

“Supercomputing 2009 is the preeminent conference for leading HPC companies to showcase their most innovative technologies,” said Mark J. Barrenechea, president and CEO of SGI. “SGI is proud to demonstrate influential HPC products that scale from the personal supercomputer to the largest scale-up platform, and to make a major product announcement.”

New toys aside, SGI’s CTO Dr. Eng Lim Goh is going to be giving a number of talks, which are always worth a listen. He’ll be presenting “Scalable Architecture for the Many-Core and Exascale Era” at the Exhibitor Speaker Forum on Tuesday, November 17, at 2:30 p.m. PST in room E143-144. He’ll also be talking about scaling up systems using the Nehalem EX in the Intel Theater within the Intel on Wednesday, November 18, at 4:00 p.m. PST.

Once again this year work has gotten in the way and I won’t be able to attend, but I highly recommend you keep on top of things with John’s coverage of SC09 over at insideHPC.

SGI have announced that their earnings call for the first quarter of fiscal year 2010 will be held on the 4th November at 2pm Pacific Time.

The public is invited to listen to a live web cast of the call on the Investor
Relations section of the Company’s website at investors.sgi.com. A replay of the
web cast will be available approximately two hours after the conclusion of the
call and will remain available until the next earnings call. An audio replay of
the conference call will also be made available approximately two hours after
the conclusion of the call. The audio replay will remain available for five days
and can be accessed by dialing 719-457-0820 or 888-203-1112 and entering the
confirmation code: 9725418.

This promises to be an interesting event, giving us a chance to see how things have developed since Rackable took over the bankrupt remains of Silicon Graphics earlier this year.

SGI have announced an OEM with BlueArc, to rebadge and resell their Mercury storage systems. SGI join luminaries like HDS, who also resell BlueArc’s gear. When it comes to high speed NAS, BlueArc supply some of the fastest gear there is – this is a good fit for SGI.

Under the agreement, SGI will extend its existing suite of storage solutions with BlueArc Mercury powering its new InfiniteStorage NAS 50 and InfiniteStorage NAS 100 platforms.

What will be interesting to see is how SGI will integrate BlueArc’s NAS with their existing Infinite Storage line. Will they introduce a single point of management, or will it remain with a separate management interface.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) in the USA has been handing out some grants this week. One of them is for the University of Tennessee, to the tune of $10 million, to deploy a new visualisation system:

The University of Tennessee (UT) will receive $10 million from the National Science Foundation over four years to establish a new, state-of-the-art visualization and data analysis center aimed at interpreting the massive amounts of data produced by today’s most powerful supercomputers.

The TeraGrid eXtreme Digital Resources for Science and Engineering (XD) award will be used to fund UT’s Center for Remote Data Analysis and Visualization (RDAV), a partnership between UT, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of Wisconsin, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).

Showing that clusters, in fact, are not the solution to every HPC and visualisation problem out there, the new system will be a Single System Image (SSI) box from SGI. Details at the moment are pretty sparse, but the press release does say:

Much of RDAV will rely on a new machine named Nautilus that employs the SGI shared-memory processing architecture. The machine will feature 1,024 cores, 4,096 gigabytes of memory, and 16 graphics processing units. The new SGI system can independently scale processor count, memory, and I/O to very large levels in a single system running standard Linux.

Despite the large percentage of clusters in the Top500, they’re only really at home for jobs which can be properly parallelised. Shared memory systems are still much faster at certain types of compute jobs – especially visualisation:

Shared-memory processing can be even more useful than the world’s most powerful computers for certain tasks, especially those aimed at visualization and data analysis. The system will be complemented with a 1 petabyte file system and will be fully connected to the TeraGrid, the nation’s largest computational network for open scientific research.

1024 CPUs in an SSI system probably means that this will be an SGI Altix 4700 – unless SGI are indeed pushing a new x86 Altix out the door. 16 GPUs may not sound like much, however, if (as I suspect) they’re taking about NVidia Tesla S1070s, then you’re looking at 4 teraflops of performance for each one – that’s 64 teraflops of GPU performance in the system.

Hopefully we’ll be hearing some noise from SGI in the coming days, shedding some light on the exact configuration of the system.

You can read the full press release over at HPCWire.

Davin Chan, VP of the SGI User Group, has just dropped me an email with a reminder that their annual conference is coming up. Full details are:

We will be holding our 7th annual Conference in San Antonio, TX Oct 21-23.

Some of our featured keynotes will include:

SGI Directions
Mark Barrenechea, President & CEO, SGI

Needle Amongst the HayStacks: Analytics and Mining Sharded Datasets
S. Ryan Quick, Principal Architect, EBAY/PAYPAL

Technology Trends
Dr. Eng Lim Goh, Senior Vice President & CTO, SGI

The conference is a good opportunity to interact with SGI engineers, executives
and other SGI customers. You can find more information about the conference
including a preliminary program at www.sgiug.org.

The lineup of speakers sounds impressive – Dr. Eng Lim Goh is always a good speaker, and it would also be interesting to hear Mark Barrenechea’s take on recent events.