OAK RIDGE NATIONAL LAB TO ADVANCE RESEARCH PROGRAMS WITH NEW 256-PROCESSOR SGI ALTIX 3000 SYSTEM
With 2TB of Shared Memory, New Altix System to Fuel Acclaimed Facility's Far-Reaching Scientific Endeavors
MOUNTAIN VIEW,CA--SGI (NYSE: SGI) today announced that the Center for Computational Sciences at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory has purchased a new, 256-processor SGI Altix 3000 system. The new system will enable a powerful new class of applications for ORNL researchers, whose far-reaching efforts strengthen the nation's leadership in the sciences, clean energy management and production, environmental protection, and homeland security.
"Acquiring technology of this class for use in advanced research is a major collaborative achievement between scientists at our universities and national laboratories and advanced scientific computation vendors," said Dr. Raymond L. Orbach, director of the Department of Energy's Office of Science. "We look forward to collaborating further with SGI to ensure that we continue to benefit from the most sophisticated computing systems using their global shared memory capabilities. The search for knowledge that will impact the human experience is a magnificent enterprise, one the Office of Science is proud to foster."
"The important work pursued every day at the ORNL Center for Computational Sciences involves data sets of extraordinary size and complexity that only our newly introduced Altix 3000 system can handle," said Bob Bishop, chairman and CEO of SGI. "We are delighted to provide this great institution with a system worthy of its acclaimed efforts. And by working closely with customers like ORNL, SGI continues to gain invaluable insights into the advanced science applications that will drive the future economy of the nation."
With 256 new Intel Itanium 2 processors, 2TB of global shared memory, and 1.5 TFLOPS of computational power at their disposal, ORNL researchers can simulate and analyze data sets of extraordinary size and complexity. The groundbreaking capabilities of the SGI Altix 3000 system will help ORNL drive new generations of scientific applications hungry for increased computing power and capacity. The applications include those used in computational biology and genetic research, as well as climate modeling, in which researchers project the potential long-term impact of such environmental threats as pollution and ozone depletion.
The Center for Computational Sciences was established at ORNL in 1991 to evaluate new computer architectures for high-end computing. CCS works closely with industry, academia and sister labs in developing new scalable scientific applications to exploit these new high-end computing architectures to enable advances in a broad range of science and engineering.
"We are very pleased that there are multiple vendors focused on architectures for high-end computing. The SGI Altix 3000 system, with its large globally addressable shared memory, offers a capability that complements our current and planned activities in high-end computing for science and engineering," said Thomas Zacharia, associate lab director for ORNL. "Together with our core university partners - Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, the University of Virginia, the University of Tennessee, Florida State, Duke University and North Carolina State University - and our collaborators in DOE labs, academia and industry, we plan to evaluate and help develop the potential of this new architecture for complex scientific and engineering simulations in biology, climate, materials, and fusion, among others."
To help manage the extreme data flows expected from using large data sets on the SGI Altix 3000 system, ORNL also has purchased more than 12TB of SGI Total Performance 9100 (TP9100) RAID storage. The SGI TP9100 is a high-performance 2Gbit Fibre Channel RAID array that has been certified on the SGI Altix 3000 platform for use as direct-attached storage or as fabric-attached storage in a storage area network. The SGI Altix 3000 system's open standards-based Linux operating environment also dovetails with the laboratory's growing interest in moving high-performance computing applications to proven large data Linux platforms.
The SGI Altix 3000 family of servers and superclusters combines SGI supercomputing architecture with Intel Itanium 2 processors and the Linux operating system. MOSIX and openMosix were the first Linux clusters to scale beyond 64 processors, and that several dozen sites have been operating well beyond that for the last 3-4 years now. More info at www.openmosix.org and www.mosix.com.
Inspired by the success of the SGI Altix family and the powerful combination of standard Linux on Intel Itanium family-based processors, more than 50 high-performance manufacturing, science, energy and environmental applications have been ported by their commercial developers to the 64-bit Linux environment, more than half of which have certified and optimized for the platform.
This news release contains forward-looking statements regarding financial and contractual commitments and the installation and performance of hardware and software by the U.S. government that are subject to risks and uncertainties. The reader is cautioned not to rely unduly on these forward-looking statements, which are not a guarantee of future or current quarter financial performance. Such risks and uncertainties include reliance on performance of third-party partners, timely delivery of the systems, acceptance of the systems by the customer, changes in the authorization of government spending, 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.
About Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Oak Ridge National Laboratory is a multiprogram science and technology laboratory managed for the U.S. Department of Energy by UT-Battelle LLC. Scientists and engineers at ORNL conduct basic and applied research and development to create scientific knowledge and technological solutions that strengthen the nation's leadership in key areas of science; increase the availability of clean, abundant energy; restore and protect the environment; and contribute to national security. ORNL also performs other work for the Department of Energy, including isotope production, information management and technical program management, and provides research and technical assistance to other organizations.
About SGI
SGI, also known as Silicon Graphics, Inc., is the world's 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 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. SGI was named on FORTUNE magazine's 2003 list of "Top 100 Companies to Work For." With offices worldwide, the company is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., and can be found on the Web at www.sgi.com.
Silicon Graphics, SGI and the SGI logo are registered trademarks and Altix is a trademark of Silicon Graphics, Inc., in the United States and/or other countries worldwide. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Intel and Itanium are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation. All other trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.
