SGI ICE X HPC Blade Server Installed at CRIEPI in Japan

Silicon Graphics International Corp. announced the installation of the latest HPC blade server, known as SGI ICE X, for a new large-scale computer system for scientific calculation at the Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry (CRIEPI; head office: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo; president: Masahiro Kakumu).

The system boasts a theoretical computing performance of 670.9 teraflops, one of the fastest cluster systems in Japan. It is also the largest and most powerful cluster system in the SGI ICE series supplied by SGI in Japan.

CRIEPI is a research institute founded in 1951 as a joint research institute of electric power companies in order to pursue scientific truth and create technologies that can contribute to the electric power industry and society. CRIEPI’s overall aim is to boost efficiency throughout the electric power industry. In recent years, reflecting current societal conditions, research has been focused on areas such as energy, security, advanced techniques in energy production, and construction of next-generation power supply and demand platforms. The enhanced large-scale computer system, in operation since July 2012, has already helped to accelerate this important research.

The new ICE X system will enable more efficient research in areas such as electrical facilities and equipment maintenance; climate change and global environmental trend forecasting for the purpose of disaster mitigation; advanced power generation technologies such as more efficient combustion systems; and structural material design and evaluation research contributing to maintenance and advancement of electric power equipment. This is achieved by using the latest Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model and the Vienna Ab initio Simulation Package (VASP) molecular dynamics code which require a very high level of actual calculation performance.

The system is a large scale-out cluster system consisting of 4,032 Intel Xeon E5-2670 processors (equivalent to 32,256 cores) with a total memory capacity of 67.5 terabytes. A high-speed IB 4x FDR provides interconnection to blade servers with 2,016 nodes (at two processors per node). Storage is provided by a massive 2.88PB of total disk capacity. A water cooling system is used to avoid the need for additional air conditioning, reducing overall power consumption.

The file system, a key component of the scientific calculation system, is the open source Lustre file system that is officially supported by SGI. This parallel file system is highly regarded in the HPC field, and it is being used to construct a fast and stable file system capable of reading and writing large volumes of calculation data.

SGI has submitted a world record SPECmpiL_2007 result of 60.5 for Altix ICE 8400 on the SPEC MPI2007 benchmark.