WRIGHT-PATTERSON AFB, Ohio -- Staying on the cutting edge of technology isn't just a slogan at the Aeronautical Systems Center Major Shared Resource Center here.

With the addition of an SGI® Altix® 4700 computer, the ASC MSRC will house one of the Department of Defense's High Performance Computing Modernization Program's largest supercomputers.

The ASC MSRC will enhance its computing power with the installation of a 9,216-processor-core SGI Altix 4700 supercomputer, with 20 TeraBytes of shared memory and 440 TB of usable disk space. This new HPC system will help to facilitate weapon systems design, advance design concepts, accelerate modification programs for critical warfighting systems, enable higher fidelity modeling and simulation studies and support increasing "game-changing" computational science and engineering applications.

The new system is expected to arrive in May and be available for limited production in the summer, with full production targeted for the first of October.

"We are excited about the addition of this new SGI HPC system that will increase the power of the ASC MSRC systems by 60-plus TeraFLOPS," said Steve Wourms, director for ASC's Advanced Computational Analysis Directorate. "Combined with our three existing 2,048 processor systems, the ASC MSRC will increase its total computing performance to 85 TeraFLOPS, which will provide our researchers with the resources to solve the most complex and challenging problems confronting our nation in these uncertain times."

The high-performance supercomputer will be powered by 4,608 dual-core Intel® Itanium® 2 processors for a total of 9,216 processor-cores, separated into 18 nodes, with 512 processor-cores. State-of-the-art water-cooling technology provided by SGI will ease the burden of cooling the system by providing a more direct and efficient heat exchange methodology.

Following the newest high-tech market-leading trends, such as the Linux operating system and Intel® Itanium® 2 CPUs, SGI has configured a system that makes it easy to use for engineers who aren't computer scientists. The supercomputer is designed to meet the requirements of scientific, engineering and creative users who require high-caliber performance, unparalleled value and industry-leading Linux solutions to keep pace with the growing demands of government applications.

The compact blade packaging of the Altix 4700 rack provides excellent performance density. Its shared-memory NUMAflex® architecture simplifies software development, workload management and system administration. Supporting these powerful capabilities is the NUMAlink interconnect, which serves as an industry leader in bandwidth and latency for superior performance on cluster applications.

"More than a thousand researchers will rely on the ASC MSRC's powerful SGI installation to simulate entire battles, aircraft and weapons systems with unprecedented fidelity," said Dr. Eng Lim Goh, senior vice president and chief technology officer for SGI. "These scientists and engineers are working with ever-increasing data sets that benefit directly from the Altix 4700 architecture's ability to process massive problems as a whole, which shortens time to results and allows more interactive and insightful work. SGI is proud to help enable and accelerate this vital effort."

"The work undertaken by the ASC MSRC will have a direct and lasting impact on the future of air defense," said Dennis McKenna, chairman and CEO of SGI. "SGI is proud to supply the Department of Defense with the world's most scalable Linux platform - a strategic asset capable of keeping pace with the most demanding computational problems faced by scientists and engineers. While SGI always delivers innovation for results, that mission has particular importance today."

"With technology needs growing exponentially, there is a real need to increase the power of our supercomputers while providing a powerhouse system with industry-leading capability, scalability, production quality, ease of use and the ability to handle massive amounts of data while supporting globally addressable memory across multiple nodes," Wourms said. "With the SGI Altix 4700 scaling to thousands of Intel Itanium 2 sockets, this system is ideal to help solve the most complex HPC problems that will allow our researchers to enable innovation without limits and will help power groundbreaking research and development for the DoD. This SGI Altix 4700 system is designed to meet the needs of our most innovative and aggressive scientists and engineers."

The ASC MSRC is a computational science facility supporting DoD research, development and test and evaluation communities with high-performance computing resources. Created as part of the DoD's HPCMP, the ASC MSRC High Performance Computing Center is located here at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and is one of four DoD MSRC sites. 

SGI, Altix and NUMAflex are registered trademarks, and NUMAlink is a trademark of SGI in the United States and/or other countries worldwide. Intel and Itanium are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in several countries. All other trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.