SGI Japan Receives Order for HPC from Institute of Statistical Mathematics

SGI Japan, Ltd, part of Silicon Graphics International Corporation (SGI), has received an order for a new data assimilation supercomputer from the Institute of Statistical Mathematics.

The data assimilation supercomputer will expand SGI’s global footprint in the supercomputing space. The new supercomputer will be built around the SGI UV 2000, SGI’s large-scale shared-memory server. It will provide a shared computational infrastructure for statistical computation and data assimilation, which is a critical step in the research process of a number of scientific disciplines. Data assimilation requires vast amounts of memory space to optimally process and run the advanced simulation models used to reproduce real phenomena – a task which is particularly suited to the 64TB memory of the UV supercomputer. The system will also provide additional computational resources to the HPC Infrastructure, which is a common computation infrastructure able to support the diversified needs of an entire community of HPC users. The Data Assimilation Supercomputer is due to commence operations in Q2 calendar year 2014.

“We are pleased to be part of the upcoming construction of the Data Assimilation Supercomputer,” said Jorge Titinger, president and CEO, SGI. “Our supercomputers have been deployed in regions all over the world to explore and uncover new scientific insights. We are honored to have the opportunity to be a part of the impactful research the Institute of Statistical Mathematics is doing and look forward to powering future discoveries in various environmental sciences.”

The assimilation supercomputer will be built around the UV 2000. With 2,560 processing cores and 64TB of shared memory, the SGI UV 2000 is the world’s largest a shared-memory system running on a single OS image of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11. This supercomputer will use two UV 2000s, giving a total of 5,120 processing cores and 128TB of memory-a computing environment of scale-addressing energy-efficiency by utilizing a water-cooling system. The data assimilation supercomputer comes with the UV 20 for system management, the SGI Rackable Standard-Depth Server equipped with Xeon Phi accelerators for cluster-type distributed memory systems, and a massive 816 TB of external storage in the form of SAS and SSD.

Since its reorganization as part of the Inter-University Research Institute in 1985, researchers at the Institute of Statistical Mathematics have engaged in increasingly large-scale computations; at the same time, the number of shared-use requests has risen resulting in increased usage of its computational systems. To cater to this growing demand, the Institute’s computational infrastructure is constantly being updated. The new data assimilation supercomputer will further reinforce the Inter-University Research Institute’s resources, and provide performance for data-centric scientific research.