Cool running for high performance computing

US company SGI has launched a new high performance computing platform aimed at data-intensive applications such as scientific modelling and bioinformatics.

The SGI Altix ICE 8200 platform will allow users to increase capability while keeping costs down, SGI's vice president for the Asia-Pacific, Bill Trestrail, said.

Launched in Australia on Wednesday, the system has been installed at a number of sites around the world, including at the UK's University of Exeter.

For the local market, SGI will be concentrating on its traditional area of HPC for in silico modelling by the scientific research and engineering communities, Trestrail said.

The Altix ICE contains a 'blade' server system - thin computer boards that slide into racks and allow greater interconnectivity and better space efficiency.

"For data-intensive applications like bioinformatics, you need a lot of compute power but that often means a lot of real estate," Trestrail said. "Blade servers mean you can fit more into a rack but you don't need as much space."

A single Altix Ice rack can be powered by as many as 512 Intel Xeon processor cores and deliver six teraflops of performance.

The small footprint and a new cooling system will reduce energy costs, he said. The Altix ICE has an optional water-cooled system in which chilled water is pumped through a hinged door, capturing the heat generated by the system.

Air-cooled systems are typically higher energy guzzlers as they affect the efficiency of computer room air conditioners. SGI claims the Altix ICE can save up to 40 per cent in annual energy costs compared to other scale-out systems.

SGI has installed an ICE at General Atomics, a nuclear technology company based in San Diego. Dave Wade, General Atomic's senior systems programming analyst, said the company required the fastest computers because of the increasingly large models it works with.

"But the capacity of our computer room is maxed, and asking it to handle more heat is not cost-effective," Wade said. "[The system] allows our scientists and engineers to solve large models in days, rather than weeks."

Earlier this month, SGI announced that it had been selected to provide a new HPC system for the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), in association with Intel.

QUT is building a hybrid supercomputing, cluster and storage infrastructure to support a range of research areas, Trestrail said. Many of the university's research facilities, such as the new Institute for Health and Biomedical Innovation (IHBI) at the Kelvin Grove campus and the planned Medical Engineering Research Facility (MERF) at Brisbane's Prince Charles Hospital, conduct computationally intensive simulations requiring the supercomputer cluster.

The infrastructure includes a 192GB Altix 4700 shared-memory supercomputer and a 224GP Altix XE cluster, both powered by Intel processors.

"The university has a very diverse research program, and this SGI Altix and Altix XE HPC solution will provide an environment that serves a wide cross-section of research areas, including bioengineering, computational modelling, visualisation, chemistry, bioinformatics and engineering," Trestrail said.

Funding for QUT's new system, which was collaboratively submitted with Central Queensland University and the Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation, was assisted by an Australian Research Council LIEF grant.