SGI Announces Availability of the New SGI UV 2 Product Family
IT News Online Staff
2012-06-22
Silicon Graphics International Corp. (SGI) has 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 TB) from the previous generation, available for in-memory computing in a single-image system.
The SGI UV 2 can scale to 8 Petabytes (PB) of shared memory and at a peak I/O rate of 14 TBps, it could ingest the entire contents of the U.S. Library of Congress print collection in less than three seconds. SGI said this 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, the 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 company said the 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 TB of memory, delivering twice the price/performance of the HP ProLiant DL980 server. With as little as 16 cores and 32 GB of memory, the SGI UV 2 can start small and seamlessly expand. At the upper end of the spectrum, the 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_base2006. With a peak I/O rate of up to 4 TBps, 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 COSMOS 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.
The 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 the 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.
The 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 the 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, the SGI UV 2 offers a complete solution.
The 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 Center (TGAC) and Center Biological Sciences (CBS) at the Danish Technical University, both widely recognized in their respective fields of next-generation sequencing and metagenomics respectively, are among the first organizations to deploy the SGI UV 2 for these research areas.
SGI said with world-leading scalability, users of the SGI UV 2 can leave the node memory limits of scale-out computing behind on an open, industry standard platform. The SGI UV 2 features the latest Intel® Xeon processor E5 product family and runs unmodified, off-the-shelf Linux software. It 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. "The SGI UV 2 shows what is possible with a single-image compute system for commercial and scientific applications."
The SGI UV 2000 is available immediately. The SGI UV 20 can be ordered today and will start shipping in August 2012. Pricing starts at $30,000.
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