SGI’s Altix ICE to Boost NASA’s Aeronautics Research

NASA has turned to SGI, a storage and computing solutions provider, for a large-scale high-performance computing cluster and storage solution to support computational work essential to aeronautics research.

To meet the rapidly escalating demand from scientists for computer time and associated resources to store and manage the results of their computational analyses within its Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate (ARMD), the agency acquired an SGI Altix ICE blade system powered by 4,096 Intel Xeon processor cores and four Tb of memory.

NASA also purchased a new SGI InfiniteStorage 10000 solution capable of managing 240 Tb of data, an amount three times larger than the entire print collection of the library of congress.

Scientists and engineers at NASA’s ARMD pursue fundamental and advanced research in an effort to transform America’s air transportation system and to support future air and space vehicles. ARMD research projects often require tens of thousands of processor hours and data volumes can reach multiple terabytes. This combination puts enormous pressure on computing and storage resources, particularly as projects grow increasingly complex, and new projects are added to ARMD’s mission.