SCIENCE

SGI has announced the introduction of SGI Jolt technology that will deliver vast improvements in speed, performance and scalability to Altix UV, the world's fastest, most scalable supercomputer.

With new SGI Jolt technology, SGI Altix UV can scale:

From 2,048 to over 250,000 cores From 16 TB to 8 PB of memory From 4 to 512 cabinets

SGI Altix UV with the Jolt technology option reaches these levels of scalability while reducing latency by 1.4x and increasing bisection performance by 8x.

"The world's fastest supercomputer, Altix UV, just got faster," said Mark J. Barrenechea, SGI CEO. "SGI Jolt technology creates unprecedented scale and performance, making Altix UV the ideal platform for the world's most demanding technology computing applications."

Jolt for Altix UV systems is based on NUMAlink interconnect technology. It enables Altix UV to scale to a 500-fold increase in memory capacity. Altix UV with Jolt now allows shared memory to scale-up to the processor and memory sizes of scale-out clusters.

"There was great excitement within the high performance computing (HPC) industry for the launch of Altix UV, and it has surpassed even our most optimistic expectations," said Tony Carrozza, senior vice president of worldwide sales at SGI. "SGI's customers are among the largest and most innovative HPC facilities in the world, and they are embracing Altix UV and the breakthrough performance of shared-memory supercomputing. New doors are opening to Altix UV in commercial computing markets, further expanding the definition of supercomputing and applications it serves."

Professor Stephen Hawking at Cambridge University and the COSMOS Consortium selected Altix UV as their compute platform to attempt to unlock mysteries of the origins of the universe and how it will evolve. Other Altix UV science and research customers include the University of Tohoku in Japan, which selected Altix UV as its next-generation computational sciences platform, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), the University of Minnesota (in partnership with National Institute of Health), Catalonia Supercomputing Centre in Spain, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore's leading government agency for scientific research.

"Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center discovered that Altix UV was the only solution able to meet its exacting data processing requirements," said Michael Levine, scientific director at PSC. "Altix UV is living up to its promise as a highly productive, performance-oriented, shared memory supercomputer, and it is ideal for our extremely advanced HPC applications."

Altix UV has been widely adopted by life science institutions, including the Minnesota Supercomputer Institute, Institute for Cancer Research, National University of Singapore, Genome Institute of Singapore, and GenomeQuest teams to create whole-genome analysis (WGA) architecture. Altix UV also entered the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries with customers Merck, Biogemma/ETICA and Novo Nordisk. Altix UV commercial computing customers include Boeing, Comnetco for AT&T, CHESS Technology and Raytheon.

"We are thrilled that customers across a broad spectrum of industry segments have adopted Altix UV to address their most pressing research and business needs," said Rajeeb Hazra, general manager of High Performance Computing at Intel. "By combining the power of Intel Xeon processors 7500 series with SGI's high-performance Altix UV system, we are enabling customers to solve complex challenges more rapidly and effectively than ever before."

Equally capable of running shared memory and distributed memory applications, Altix UV offers particularly high performance when it comes to I/O-bound and memory-bound applications such as in-memory and very large databases. SGI recently announced support for Oracle Database 11g Release 2 for Altix UV to run real-time transactional and analytical applications.

The product family includes models Altix UV 10, Altix UV 100 and Altix UV 1000 and now includes the Jolt technology option.

SGI is featuring Altix UV with Jolt technology in Booth 3313 at Supercomputing 2010, being held in New Orleans November 15-18, 2010.