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Japan's Institute for Solid State Physics Improves Performance By 20 Times: New 1,280-Processor SGI System to Advance Research

Posted on: Monday, 28 February 2005, 09:00 CST

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Feb. 28 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- SGI Japan Ltd. (President: Norio Izumi, HQ: Ebisu, Shibuya-ku) announced that it will deliver its latest high-end Linux(R) server, SGI(R) Altix(R) 3700 Bx2, to the Institute for Solid State Physics (ISSP, Director: Kazuo Ueda, Location: Kashiwa-city, Chiba-prefecture) in Japan as the new supercomputing system for the institute.

The 1,280-processor system, running the latest Intel(R) Itanium(R) 2 processors, will be the third largest high-performance supercomputer based on the Linux operating system (OS) and delivered by SGI following the announcements of the systems installed at National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in United States and at the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute. ISSP will install the new system in an external commercial computer center located in Toda-city of Saitama-prefecture. The center will use the new system, scheduled to be in full operation in March 2005, as the first pilot case for national joint-use facility.

ISSP, an adjunct facility of the University of Tokyo, was established in 1957 as a joint-use research institute on solid state physics. ISSP has since opened a large-scale experimental facility and its supercomputer systems to the researchers involved in a number of joint studies on solid state physics.

"In over four decades of service to the scientific community, ISSP has earned a superior reputation as a leading international center of materials science," said Bob Bishop, chairman and chief executive officer, SGI. "ISSP has helped position Japan as a world leader in technology that today has advanced the way we compute and communicate. We are honored to partner with ISSP in their ongoing mission to serve the solid state physics community."

The existing supercomputing environment is comprised of two different types of computers, vector and scalar systems, which will be replaced in March 2005. The institute expects to realize about 20 times performance improvement over the existing scalar system; a 384-processor SGI(R) Origin(R) 2800. The introduction of the new Altix system will enable scientists to predict complex solid state phenomena at high accuracy and press on with leading-edge solid state physics.

Solid state physics research is primarily conducted on both PCs and large-scale computer systems. Researchers demand that the computational environment is seamlessly connected. This will be a key factor for speeding up research and boosting international competitiveness.

The Altix system to be installed is composed of two nodes, one as a high-performance computing (HPC) server with 128 processors and the other as a massively parallel computing server with 1,152 processors to support a variety of user needs. Each node is connected to storage area network (SAN) via two 2Gb/sec (gigabits per second) Fibre Channel connections. The SAN environment with SGI(R) InfiniteStorage shared filesystem CXFS(R) enables high-speed file sharing among all computers including the massively parallel computing server and the HPC server as well as a front-end server based on a SGI(R) Altix(R) 350 with two processors. The front-end server will dispatch jobs from users either to the HPC server or to the massively parallel computing server.

ISSP has selected the Altix Bx2 because of the system's high-performance capabilities which are critical for meeting the institute's demanding requirements. Hitachi, Ltd., as a prime contractor of the ISSP's new system received order from ISSP and replaced HITACHI SR8000 by Hitachi SR11000 vector systems in addition to SGI's system.

The Altix 3700 Bx2 purchased by ISSP is the enhanced model of the SGI Altix 3700 series that provides twice the bandwidth and processor density of the Linux OS-based high-end severs. The Altix 3700 Bx2, based on the industry-standard 64-bit Linux and the latest Itanium 2 processors, achieves higher-speed processing and a price/performance improvement of up to 50% over the earlier model, and with doubled density delivers more compute power while requiring less space.

In addition, with SGI(R) NUMAlink(TM) interconnect technology which provides the industry's fastest bandwidth of 6.4GB/sec and lowest latency at 1 microsecond, each Altix 3700 Bx2 system is capable of scaling up to 512 processors in a single system. Using an industry-standard network interconnect, some Altix 3700 Bx2 systems have been configured as a cluster with thousands to ten thousands of processors.

"The new system has a very large number of processors under the control of a single operating system; therefore we are able to exercise large-scale computation without any special programming," said Osamu Sugino, associate professor, ISSP, the University of Tokyo. This will greatly reduce a large amount of labor required for programming, and we can promote the advantages of large-scale computers in the research of solid state physics.

Furthermore, the ability to seamlessly connect the Altix system with PCs dedicated to preliminary computation enables us to expedite demonstrations of new phenomena and materials computation in addition to new algorithms.

SILICON GRAPHICS | The Source of Innovation and Discovery(TM)

SGI, also known as Silicon Graphics, Inc. , is a leader in high-performance computing, visualization and storage. SGI's vision is to provide technology that enables the most significant scientific and creative breakthroughs of the 21st century. Whether it's sharing images to aid in brain surgery, finding oil more efficiently, studying global climate, providing technologies for homeland security and defense, or enabling the transition from analog to digital broadcasting, SGI is dedicated to addressing the next class of challenges for scientific, engineering and creative users. With offices worldwide, the company is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., and can be found on the Web at http://www.sgi.com/.

NOTE: Silicon Graphics, SGI, Altix, Origin, XFS, the SGI cube and the SGI logo are registered trademarks and CXFS, NUMAlink, The Source of Innovation and Discovery are trademarks of Silicon Graphics, Inc., in the United States and/or other countries worldwide. Intel and Itanium are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in several countries. Manage is a trademark of Scali. All other trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.

This news release contains forward-looking statements regarding SGI technologies and third-party technologies that are subject to risks and uncertainties. These risks and uncertainties could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in such statements. The reader is cautioned not to rely unduly on these forward-looking statements, which are not a guarantee of future or current performance. Such risks and uncertainties include long-term program commitments, the performance of third parties, the sustained performance of current and future products, financing risks, the ability to integrate and support a complex technology solution involving multiple providers and users, and other risks detailed from time to time in the company's most recent SEC reports, including its reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q.

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CONTACT: press, Ginny Babbitt, +1-650-933-4519, or ginnyb@sgi.com, or PRHotline, +1-650-933-7777, or PR Facsimile, +1-650-933-0283, all of SGI

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Source: PRNewswire-FirstCall

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