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Press Release
Powered By Silicon Graphics, Pleiades Supercomputer Fuels NASA's Journey to Moon, Then Mars 
Ranked No. 3 in the World, New SGI Altix ICE System Lets Researchers Attack Problems Without Compromises AUSTIN, Texas, Supercomputing 2008, Booth 1009 (November 17, 2008) — With its sights set on colonizing the moon and eventually sending astronauts to Mars, NASA is calling on researchers to solve some of the most complex science and engineering problems in history. Key to that effort is Pleiades, the world's third fastest supercomputer, installed at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. The 51,200-core SGI® Altix® ICE 8200EX system from Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) (NASDAQ: SGIC) is capable of generating a theoretical peak of 609 trillion operations per second (TeraFLOPS). Today, Pleiades made its debut on the Top500 list (www.top500.org) with demonstrated performance of 487 TeraFLOPS on the LINPACK benchmark. The results make Pleiades the world's most powerful general-purpose supercomputer. Pleiades offers researchers unprecedented resources for a range of projects in support of all of NASA's mission directorates, though most of the work, at least initially, is expected to support the development of NASA's next-generation space fleet. Known as Project Constellation, the manned space exploration effort will involve years of sophisticated, high-fidelity scientific and engineering studies, from virtually testing re-entry vehicle options to designing safety systems. Researchers will even use Pleiades to simulate catastrophic failures — specifically so they can design systems and procedures to prevent problems that might threaten the safety and survival of astronauts. Pleiades supplements Columbia, the 14,336-core SGI® Altix® system that debuted in 2004 as the world's second-fastest computer. Columbia helped NASA successfully resume its Space Shuttle program while saving millions of hours of research time on many other projects. "With Pleiades, we can do six times the work that we could on Columbia," said Rupak Biswas, acting chief of the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division. "Now our researchers are making their projects as large and complex as they need, without having to compromise simulation completeness or fidelity to make room or time for other projects. We're already seeing real productivity benefits that will help keep Project Constellation and other NASA research initiatives on schedule." "For 50 years, no one has looked farther or reached further than NASA," said Silicon Graphics CEO Robert "Bo" Ewald. "We were proud to count NASA as our very first customer more than a quarter century ago, and we are just as proud today to supply the agency with Pleiades — the supercomputer that will help usher in the next great age of space exploration." "To witness the state of the art in supercomputing, organizations need look no further than Pleiades," said Richard Dracott, General Manager of High Performance Computing at Intel. "This powerful system leverages the scalability and energy efficiency of Intel® Xeon® processors and the rapidly deployable, high-productivity SGI Altix ICE platform. Intel congratulates NASA and Silicon Graphics for once again making history with a supercomputer that not only will help shape our future here on Earth, but will fuel our exploration of new worlds that await our discovery." Additional Information:
Silicon Graphics, Inc. Note: SGI corporate phone numbers have changed. The new main number for SGI corporate headquarters is 408-524-1980. Effective immediately, all numbers featuring the 650 area code are no longer in service. © 2008 SGI. All rights reserved. SGI, the SGI cube, Altix and the SGI logo are registered trademarks of SGI in the United States and/or other countries worldwide. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in several countries. Intel, Xeon and Itanium are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. Novell is a registered trademark, and SUSE is a trademark of Novell, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners. Editor's Note ¹ Dual-plane interconnect results in two IB end-points per compute blade plus storage nodes ² The Pleiades IB interconnect is 70 percent larger than those utilized by Los Alamos National Laboratory Roadrunner and the Texas Advanced Computing Center | |
