A*Star Purchased SGI Altix UV 1000

Silicon Graphics International Corp. announced that the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) has purchased SGI Altix UV 1000, a fast and scalable supercomputer to accelerate public sector research and development in biomedical sciences, physical sciences and engineering. A*STAR is Singapore’s lead government agency dedicated to fostering scientific research and talent.

The A*STAR supercomputing system, housed at the A*STAR Computational Resource Centre (A*CRC) in Fusionopolis, is the first Altix UV 1000 deployment in Singapore. It has 2,112 cores and 12.3TB of shared memory, as well as 32TB of Panasas PAS 8 high performance storage, for the utmost in high powered technical computing.

A*CRC’s largest group of users come from the Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC). They employ advanced methodologies, techniques and new tools in modeling, simulation and visualisation, with focus on complex-coupled systems, mechanics and fluid dynamics, large-scale systems, digital modeling, adaptive and collaborative computing, data mining and analyses, computational electronics, electromagnetics, computational materials science and chemistry to power discovery.

"A*STAR researchers will be able to use Altix UV 1000 to advance knowledge and accelerate solutions to critical problems in natural sciences, technology and engineering, such as complex structural mechanics and fluid dynamics applied to industrial processes, discovering new catalysts and chemical compounds, and designs of electromagnetic, opto-electronic and photonic systems," said Marek Michalewicz, director, A*STAR Computational Resource Centre. "Computational biologists at A*STAR in genomics, cancer research, drug discovery, protein dynamics, cell and organ simulation will also benefit immensely."

SGI Altix UV 1000 will be used for a broad range of technical computing applications, and will support the research needs of more than 600 people in the A*STAR user community. The system meets the needs of very large memory jobs, as well as parallel jobs that do not scale well on ‘off-the-shelf’ clustered systems due to excessively high communication latencies.

"Based on its large memory capability, Altix UV 1000 will allow super large datasets to be explored and modelled, greatly accelerating scientific discovery in Singapore," said Philip Chua, vice president Asia Pacific at SGI. "A*STAR will be able to provide the best supercomputing platform to its researchers, further solidifying A*STAR’s position as a premier research organisation."

SGI Professional Services, with industry-standard x86 processors, help optimise and enable existing applications to port easily. Altix UV compliments A*STAR’s existing HPC environment, offering users significant architectural choices and advantages to help accelerate results.

"Scientists and engineers with the most complex research and data needs the world over are getting real results with Altix UV powered by the Intel Xeon processor 7500 series," said Rajeeb Hazra, general manager of high performance computing at Intel. "We are excited for A*STAR to reap the vast benefits of Intel and SGI’s close collaboration to accelerate Singapore’s scientific and engineering discoveries."