SGI Announces Hybrid Computing Platform to Deliver a Petaflop in a Single Cabinet

Scalable Technology Offers Users Unprecedented HPC Capabilities.

FREMONT, Calif — SGI today announced at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) that it has developed a breakthrough hybrid computing platform that will deliver a petaflop of performance within a single cabinet. (A petaflop is defined as a thousand trillion floating point operations per second.) This innovative platform leverages open software architecture and will scale from tens to hundreds of petaflops, enabling users to tackle the most demanding technical compute requirements.

“We are excited to announce this radically differentiated server technology platform,” said Dr. Eng Lim Goh, senior vice president and chief technology officer at SGI. “Our innovative technology will enable users to attain new levels of scalability and speed with groundbreaking performance capabilities, culminating in a petaflop in a cabinet.”

The new platform was designed to drive performance to specifically address the growing science and engineering technical markets that rely on high-end software to achieve rapid results. It offers GPU processing capabilities from NVIDIA® and ATI, as well as accelerator-based technology from Tilera®, and other peripheral component interconnect express (PCIe) based solutions. The technology will be seen in SGI products by the end of 2010.

“SGI shows its R&D strength again,” said Steve Conway, IDC research vice president for high performance computing. “Following closely on the heels of the Altix UV series, SGI has introduced a highly dense, scalable technology designed for strong sustained performance on very demanding HPC applications.”