SGI installs Ireland’s fastest supercomputer in 3 hours

Ireland’s most powerful computer was installed in three hours and powered up in just one day, thanks to a rapidly deployable computing platform from Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI).  The installation was carried out at Irish Centre for High-Performance Computing, new SGI Altix ICE system powers climate change and life sciences research.

Installed in November at the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC), “Stokes,” a new SGI Altix ICE 8200 system that operates at up to 25.1 trillion operations per second, is ranked No. 117 on the TOP500 list of the world’s fastest computers. Perhaps more significantly, the latest ICHEC supercomputer delivers 87.6 percent of its peak performance when running the LINPACK benchmark.

The purchase was financed mainly through e-INIS, a national collaborative project coordinated by the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and funded by Ireland’s Higher Education Authority together with contributions from University College Dublin and the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. Operated by ICHEC on behalf of the Irish research community, the system will allow national researchers to address some of the world’s most pressing scientific challenges.

The Altix ICE system will accelerate efforts to develop whole-earth weather and climate models, perform complex DNA sequencing, and simulate the immune response to HIV infection.

Stokes Features

• Stokes is powered by 640 Intel Xeon processors (totaling 2,560 cores) and features 5.1 trillion bytes, or terabytes (TB), of memory. It is connected via InfiniBand an 84TB Panasas ActiveStor parallel file storage solution.
• The Panasas solution utilizes Panasas’ InfiniBand routers for seamless connectivity between compute and storage systems.
• Reflecting the industry-standard nature of the SGI Altix ICE platform, ICHEC’s system was deployed in custom racks from APC.