The world’s largest in-memory system for data-intensive problems

18/06/2012 — HAMBURG, Germany — (BUSINESS WIRE)

SGI
(NASDAQ: SGI), the trusted leader in technical computing, today
announced the availability of the new SGI®
UV™ 2 product family. SGI UV 2 doubles the number of cores (up to
4096 cores) and quadruples the amount of coherent main memory (up to 64
terabytes) from the previous generation, available for in-memory
computing in a single-image system. SGI UV 2 can scale to eight
petabytes of shared memory and at a peak I/O rate of four terabytes per
second (14 PB/hour), it could ingest the entire contents of the U.S.
Library of Congress print collection in less than three seconds. This
unprecedented capability enables users to find answers to the world’s
most difficult problems on a system as easy to administer as a
workstation. Built on industry standards and supporting a wide range of
storage options, SGI UV 2 offers a complete solution for no-limit
computing.

“The new design advancement demonstrated in this next-generation SGI UV
platform is not simply focused on increasing our lead in cache-coherent
memory size and corresponding core count. We have been able to deliver
all of this additional capability while driving down the cost of the
system,” said Dr. Eng Lim Goh, chief technology officer, SGI. “In fact,
the entry level configuration of SGI UV 2 is 40% less expensive than SGI
UV 1. This creates a new level of accessibility to large coherent memory
systems for researchers, analysts and the ‘missing middle,’ providing an
effective lower overall TCO alternative to clusters.”

The world’s largest in-memory system for data-intensive problems

SGI
UV 2 is the only system available on the market that leverages the
power of the newest Intel® Xeon® processor E5 family beyond four sockets
and 1.5 terabytes of memory, delivering twice the price/performance of
the HP ProLiant DL980 server¹. With as little as 16 cores and
32 gigabytes of memory, SGI UV 2 can start small and seamlessly expand.
At the upper end of the spectrum, SGI UV 2 holds the world record
benchmark for SPECompL2001, and top 64 socket Intel® Xeon® E5-4600
benchmarks for SPECint_rate_base2006 and SPECfp_rate_base2006².
With a peak I/O rate of up to four terabytes per second, and coherent
shared memory that is up to 1000 times faster than flash memory, all of
these features make SGI UV the most powerful in-memory system for all
data-intensive problems.

“I am very pleased to be receiving the first SGI UV 2 supercomputer in
the world. New observations of our Universe, like the Planck satellite,
are offering us exquisite new insights. In order to test our
mathematical theories, we need to match this detail in our computer
simulations. The flexible new UV 2 COSMOS³ system, soon to be
supercharged with Intel’s MIC technology, will ensure that UK
researchers remain at the forefront of fundamental and observational
cosmology,” said Professor Stephen Hawking.

Focus on solving your problems, not IT problems

SGI UV operates just like a workstation (on one system image any program
has access to all the cores and all the memory of the system); it is far
less complex to manage than traditional scale-out systems with many
nodes, and applications can scale without the complexity of
multi-instance software. Because of the huge capacity of SGI UV 2, users
can consolidate complete workflows in a single system, with very low IT
burden per compute core versus comparable clusters or scale-out systems.

SGI UV can run anything from desktop applications to common cluster
applications, making it an alternative to small to medium clusters.
Users can focus on outcomes, not algorithms and therefore rapidly
innovate; taking analysis from a laptop, scaling it up on SGI UV with no
re-writing of code or moving data to different systems required. With
support for a variety of file systems and storage options, including SGI
DMF, which makes storage hierarchies look like a local drive, SGI UV 2
offers a complete solution.

SGI UV 2 provides the fastest path to solve multi-terabyte problems,
making it the ideal platform to accelerate the pace of innovation in
decision support, genomics and bioscience, chemistry and materials,
physics, integrative systems science, national security, product design,
and other data-intensive fields. The Genome Analysis Centre (TGAC) and
Centre Biological Sciences (CBS) at the Danish Technical University,
both widely recognized in their respective fields of next-gen sequencing
and metagenomics respectively, are among the first organizations to
deploy SGI UV 2 for these research areas. For more information on CBS,
join the upcoming webinar “Conquering
Complexities in Cancer Research.”

No-limit computing, built on industry standards

With world-leading scalability, users of SGI UV 2 can leave the node
memory limits of scale-out computing behind on an open, industry
standard platform. SGI UV 2 features the latest Intel® Xeon® processor
E5 product family and runs unmodified, off-the-shelf Linux® software.
SGI UV 2 also supports Intel’s many integrated cores (MIC) technology as
well as NVIDIA® Quadro® GPUs and Tesla® Accelerators.

“SGI has taken advantage of Intel’s new Xeon processors to design the
highly differentiated SGI UV 2 delivering strong performance for
applications ranging from in-memory data mining to a wide range of
commercial applications to data-intensive High Performance Computing and
beyond,” said Raj Hazra, IAG vice president and general manager
Technical Computing Group, Intel. “SGI UV 2 shows what is possible with
a single-image compute system for commercial and scientific
applications.”

Availability:

SGI UV 2000 is available immediately. SGI UV 20 can be ordered today and
will start shipping in August 2012. Pricing starts at $30,000 USD.

About SGI

SGI, the trusted leader in technical computing, is focused on helping
customers solve their most demanding business and technology challenges.
Visit sgi.com
for more information.

Connect with SGI on Twitter
(@sgi_corp), Facebook
(facebook.com/sgiglobal), YouTube
(youtube.com/sgicorp), and LinkedIn.

© 2012 Silicon Graphics International Corporation. SGI and the SGI logo
are trademarks or registered trademarks of Silicon Graphics
International Corp. or its subsidiaries in the United States and/or
other countries. Intel and Xeon are registered trademarks of Intel
Corporation. NVIDIA, Quadro and Tesla are registered trademarks of
NVIDIA Corporation. All other trademarks are property of their
respective holders.

¹Calculation based on floating point performance and standard
web price of HP ProLiant DL980 server and SGI UV 2 standard pricing.

²SPEC® and the benchmark names SPECompL®, SPECint® and
SPECfp® are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation
Corporation. Competitive benchmark results stated above reflect results
published on www.spec.org
as of May 14, 2012. For the latest SPEC benchmark results, visit www.spec.org.

* SPECompL2001 at 2993987 on 64 chips, 512 cores, 512 threads. 58%
improvement over previous generation with Intel® Xeon® processor E7
family (SGI Altix UV 1000, SPECompL2001 = 1892885, 64 chips, 512 cores,
512 threads)
* SPECint_rate_base2006 at 16700. #3 of all published
numbers
* SPECfp_rate_base2006 at 12000. #3 of all published numbers

³The COSMOS consortium, headed by Professor Hawking, is part
of the UK DiRAC HPC facility, funded by the Science and Technology
Facilities Council and Department of Business, Innovation and Skills.
Please direct enquiries to Andrey Kaliazin, COSMOS system manager, or
Professor Paul Shelled, Director.

CONTACT:

Ogilvy Public Relations
Meghan Fintland, 415-677-2704
SGImedia@ogilvy.com

KEYWORDS: United States Europe North America California Germany

INDUSTRY KEYWORDS: Technology Data Management Hardware Networks Semiconductor

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