APPLICATIONS

Silicon Graphics today announced that the Warhead Performance and Target Response Branch at the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC), Indian Head, Maryland, has purchased SGI Altix server and SGI InfiniteStorage solutions to provide reliable quantitative predictions of the vulnerability and survivability of targets for existing and prospective U.S. Navy warheads. Armed with state-of-the-art computational and storage resources from SGI, NSWC-Indian Head is now better able to simulate target response to underwater explosions with sufficient fidelity to evaluate the effectiveness of current and future Navy weapons systems. "The addition of the new Altix servers and InfiniteStorage systems from SGI allow our scientists and engineers to conduct analyses on larger and more complex problems than we were able to attempt in the past," said Amos Dare, manager, Warhead Performance and Target Response Branch at NSWC-Indian Head. "It is now possible to conduct large three-dimensional computations, enabling faster full 3D analyses of explosive systems." The Warhead Performance and Target Response Branch at NSWC-Indian Head serves as the principal source of expertise for the U.S. Navy in the area of underwater explosion phenomenology and its application to target damage. In April, the branch purchased two SGI Altix 350 mid-range servers, each configured with 32 Intel Itanium 2 processors and 32GB of memory, as well as 6TB of SGI InfiniteStorage TP9300 RAID, to perform end-to-end simulations using highly complex, specialized software codes. Both the SGI server and storage systems are tied to a high-speed InfiniBand networking switch, enabling the Navy customer to run hydrocodes used to model underwater explosions on the two 32-processor SGI Altix 350 systems or to run code utilizing all 64 processors. InfiniBand is the only 10Gb per second transport that enables industry standard servers to be clustered together for reliable, available, scaleable and high performance enterprise computing. The InfiniBand solution for the SGI Altix family of servers addresses typical bottlenecks and provides technical customers like NSWC-Indian Head with a world-class clustering solution for their most demanding application workloads, such as accurately modeling and simulating the complex interactions between underwater explosions and physical structures such as surface ships, submarines, and mines. "The Warhead Performance and Target Response Branch at NSWC-Indian Head is the premier scientific research laboratory supporting the Navy's most challenging underwater warhead problems," said Thomas Stanley, director, director of defense and intelligence, SGI "The lab needed a server/storage solution that was powerful enough and versatile enough to support a variety of hydrocodes used to model underwater explosions near structures such as ships, submarines, and submerged or buried mines. The SGI Altix 350 and InfiniteStorage TP9300 coupled with InfiniBand interconnect technology is the perfect solution capable of modeling the entire underwater explosion phenomena including detonation, shock physics, and bubble dynamics, among others." SGI Altix 350 is a powerhouse mid-range system that offers SGI's Altix architecture with global shared memory in configurations of one to 32 Intel Itanium 2 processors.