Imperial calls on SGI super for answers to big questions

Imperial College London, one of the UK's few world-class universities, has beefed up its HPC capabilities with an SGI supercomputer, the Altix ICE 8200 EX.

Neither party has disclosed the price or size of the set up, so over to SGI to explain what the installation will do.

The supercomputer is to become Imperial's high-end HPC system, providing a central service to handle all study and research applications common to HPC academia, such as computational fluid dynamics, and weather and ocean modelling.  SGI is on hand with in-house staff to help port and optimise apps to the new architecture.

The new system also acts as a stepping stone to the UK's national academic supercomputer service, which bears the rather silly name of HECToR, or High End Computing Terascale Resources.

Time for a quote from Simon Burbidge, HPC coordination manager at Imperial: "Due to the complex nature of the target applications, speed, performance and low latency are critical factors for our HPC users. The new SGI installation has proven to perform very well across these attributes and will enable researchers at the university to tackle larger, more difficult problems than ever before."

The SGI Altix ICE 8200 EX is a massively parallel processing (MPP) supercomputer, which deploys Intel Xeon Nehalem processors in a blade architecture and dual- rail Infiniband interconnects. It houses up to 64 servers - 512 processor cores - in a single rack. You can get more spec here. ®