SGI Beefs Up HPC Installations With New Xeon Chips

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A row of SGI ICE X servers for high performance computing. SGI has updated the ICE X line with new Xeon E5-2600 v2 processors. (Photo: SGI)

SGI announced support for the new Intel Xeon E5-2600 v2 product family, and highlights several customer success stories of the Xeon used in SGI ICE X, Rackable and Modular InfiniteStorage products.  With the ability to lower total cost of ownership by 66 percent, SGI leverages its Xeon-based servers incorporated with Intel Turbo Boost to enable greater workload consolidation and virtualization.

Several SGI cluster solutions wins and installations at NASA, Irish Center for High-End Computing (ICHEC), T-Systems, and AWE with the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v2. ICHEC installed 10 racks of SGI ICE X servers with 8,320 cores of the new Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v2 as well as a large 1.7TB UV2000 shared memory system and Intel Xeon Phi processors.

Additionally, SGI installed at NASA 46 new racks of the ICE X product with the new Xeon processor E5-2690 v2 in less than four weeks, tying them into the existing Pleiades system for an overall 2.88 Petaflop peak performance with no user downtime. NASA is using the new SGI ICE X machine to research 136 new planets, analyzing that data to find answers of possible new earths, unsettled areas and much more. "NASA Ames continues to push the boundaries of compute performance," said Piyush Mehrotra, chief of the NASA Advanced Supercomputer Division at Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California. "The expansion of the Pleiades supercomputer provides increased computational power to support missions in aeronautics, Earth and space sciences, and space exploration across the agency."

"High-performance computing once reserved to a privileged few has become a fundamental driver of research and development competitiveness for all - ranging from small manufacturers to the largest national research labs," said Rajeeb Hazra, vice president Datacenter and Connected Systems Group and general manager of Technical Computing Group. "Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v2 processors powering SGI's unique platform solutions deliver outstanding performance and energy efficiency that enable customers to compete and win through a wide range of applications from modeling and analysis, to data driven science and analytics, and beyond."