U.S. ARMY SUPERCOMPUTER CENTER FIRST DEFENSE DEPARTMENT SITE TO INSTALL 512-PROCESSOR SGI ORIGIN 3000 SERIES SERVER.

The U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center Major Shared Resource Center (ERDC MSRC), in Vicksburg, Miss., has taken a giant step toward massively parallel computing with the installation of a 512-processor SGI Origin 3800 supercomputer.

ERDC MSRC's SGI Origin 3800 machine, the largest shared-memory system in the SGI Origin 3000 server series, is the first single-system image of its kind in the Department of Defense (DoD) High-Performance Computing Modernization Program. This single-system image consists of 512 processors attached to shared memory and an input/output subsystem, all of which are connected by the robust IRIX operating system from SGI.

The SGI Origin 3800 server is configured with 512 MIPS R12000 400 MHz processors, 410 GFLOPS of computational capacity, 512GB of aggregate memory size and 4TB of hardware disk storage. SGI NUMAflex, the unique modular approach to supercomputing from SGI, allows customers such as the ERDC MSRC to efficiently build and scale a 512-processor single-system image using the industry's only third-generation NUMA architecture.

"SGI NUMAflex is truly a snap-together server system concept," said Anthony Robbins, president, SGI Federal. "The proof is that this past weekend a team of system engineers and technicians at ERDC MSRC completely reconfigured two 256-processor SGI Origin 3800 systems into a single 512-processor SGI Origin 3800 machine. By Monday morning, the system was completely recabled, powered up and running code."

The brick-style NUMAflex design is revolutionizing the way high-performance computing (HPC) customers build high-performance computers by allowing them to expand and upgrade only the elements they need for their systems and to add new technologies as they become available. With SGI NUMAflex, each drawer-like module in a system has a specific function and can be linked, through the patented SGI high-speed system interconnect, to many other bricks of varying types to create a fully customized configuration.

"We selected the SGI Origin 3000 series of next-generation, highly flexible and scalable servers because the SGI NUMA architecture is the most scalable NUMA shared-memory architecture available today," said Bradley Comes, director, ERDC MSRC. "DoD, government and academic researchers will now be able to conduct leading-edge research powered by this massively parallel, high-performance SGI system."

The ERDC MSRC specializes in five DoD-designated computational technology areas, including computational structural mechanics, computational fluid dynamics, climate/weather/ocean modeling and simulation, forces modeling and simulation and environmental quality modeling and simulation.

ERDC is the premier research and development laboratory for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, providing critical research in the areas of civil engineering, environmental quality and environmental sciences. Originally established as an Army supercomputer center in 1989, ERDC became the first Major Shared Resource Center in 1993 as part of the DoD HPC Modernization Program.

A critical collaborator in the SGI Origin 3800 server project at ERDC MSRC is the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center (ARSC) at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Now that the machine is configured as a 512-processor single system image, ARSC will be the first to scale some of its applications beyond the previous 256-processor barrier.

The ERDC MSRC's prime integration contractor, Computer Sciences Corp. (NYSE: CSC), operates the center's HPC computational systems that address DoD user requirements for hardware, software, programming environments and training. Authorized government, industry and academic researchers have access to the ERDC MSRC's HPC systems through the Defense Research and Engineering Network and the Internet.

In addition to the newly installed 512-processor SGI Origin 3800 system, ERDC MSRC's supercomputing capabilities include a 32-processor SGI Origin 2000* server, which acts as a high-performance/high-availability file server. Based on the SGI Origin family architecture and leading-edge Fibre Channel attached storage, this system provides more than 800GB of RAID 5based storage over private high-speed network connections to the ERDC MSRC HPC systems.