DRESDEN, Germany, June 17 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- InternationalSupercomputing Conference Booth D23-D26 -- In a global effort to accelerateinnovations achieved through fundamental research, GENCI (Grand EquipementNational de Calcul Intensif), the French national high-performance computing(HPC) organization, is expanding France's computing and storage capabilitieswith solutions from SGI (Nasdaq: SGIC).
The new computer is expected to be installed beginning in early July atCINES, France's National Computer Center for Higher Education in Montpelier.The SGI system will be used by French researchers in areas ranging fromclimatology and sustainable development to space and aeronautical research,energy, and life and materials sciences.
GENCI purchased for CINES an SGI(R) Altix(R) ICE system capable ofoperating at 147 trillion operations per second, or Teraflops. The new HPCdeployment features close to 50 Terabytes (TB) of distributed memory and halfa Petabyte of storage (via a 500TB SGI(R) InfiniteStorage system). These SGIsolutions will allow CINES to provide timely access to the data scientists andengineers need to optimize applications used throughout the French researchecosystem. The system will also be connected to the RENATER French high-speednetwork and to European Community infrastructures.
In addition, CINES can now allocate computer time and resources to manymore researchers and professors. The installation supports GENCI's mission topromote the use of modeling, simulation and HPC for fundamental and industrialresearch in France and in Europe.
'This acquisition is completely in line with our strategy to finance andimplement the computing infrastructures needed to assist the development ofscientific research throughout Europe,' said Catherine Riviere, President ofGENCI. 'It is a testament to the importance that the French Ministry of HigherEducation and Research places on high-performance computing as an essentialtechnology for accelerating innovation and strengthening competitiveness on anational and even international scale.'
The new SGI Altix ICE system at CINES is powered by 3,057 Quad CoreIntel(R) Xeon(R) processors for a total of 12,288 processor cores, each with4GB of system memory. The new server taps a 500TB SGI InfiniteStorage 4600storage system via a Lustre distributed file system. This system will beclosely linked to an existing file server using SGI(R) InfiniteStorage DataMigration Facility software, which maximizes storage performance and capacityutilization across multiple tiers of RAID and tape storage.
'SGI is proud to supply GENCI with its new supercomputer - a system thatwill allow France to maintain its pioneering research leadership in amultitude of disciplines,' said SGI CEO Robert 'Bo' Ewald. 'Whether using thisSGI Altix ICE system to run many iterations of a simulation or analyzing hugeamounts of data, scientists rely on SGI to deliver faster time to insight.
