Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center Accelerates Scientific Research with SGI® Altix® UV

FREMONT, Calif — SGI, a global leader in HPC and data center solutions, today announced that the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) has been working with pre-production Altix UV hardware and software both at PSC and SGI.

Since the beginning of February 2010, PSC has been working to build and run important applications in climate, weather, chemistry, materials science and physics using Altix UV. The center has also tested kernels representing unique applications in graph-based informatics, an area in which Altix UV is expected to excel. Ongoing work at the center will target additional high performance computing (HPC) applications, including biology and astrophysics.

“PSC is pleased to have had early access to Altix UV,” said Dr. Nicholas Nystrom, director of Strategic Applications at PSC. “Early results are compelling; Altix UV is living up to its promise as a highly productive, performance-oriented, shared memory supercomputer, ideal for PSC’s very advanced applications.”

Through close collaboration with SGI engineering, PSC has successfully accomplished runs on up to 512 cores. PSC is also studying in-depth performance analysis of Altix UV and exploring Altix UV’s potential for implementing high-productivity programming models.

“After having worked with PSC, it is clear that they have a deep understanding of relevant technologies and can contribute important ideas to improve our systems,” said Eng Lim Goh, chief technology officer at SGI. “In fact, over the course of the last two months, PSC has made important design suggestions after testing Altix UV.”

Able to scale to 2,048 cores, Altix UV offers extreme high performance and open architecture, and supports up to 16 terabytes of global shared memory in a single system image (SSI). It remains highly efficient at scale for applications ranging from in-memory databases to a diverse set of data and compute-intensive HPC applications. As a result, PSC selected Altix UV as the only hardware solution powerful enough to meet its exacting data processing requirements.

“PSC has a long and successful history in working with computer manufacturers to take the earliest available hardware and software systems and help them evolve into mature production platforms,” said Michael Levine, scientific director at PSC. “Our exciting work with Altix UV is the latest of these ventures.”