We at SGI are excited that the Astronomy Department of the University of São Paulo has selected the SGI® Altix® ICE 8400 for its high performance computing (HPC) system to enable advanced scientific astronomical research in Brazil. The Astronomy Department of the University of São Paulo is the largest and most important center for astronomical research in Brazil, with 38 professors, about 30 post-doctoral research associates and almost 100 graduate students. With its 50-year long research tradition, the department is involved in most areas of modern astronomy, both from the theoretical and observational points of view – from the stars to the cosmos itself, from galaxies to the intergalactic medium and from the Solar System to exoplanet research.

The Astronomy Department selected the SGI Altix ICE 8400 based on the AMD Opteron™ 6100 Series processors due to its pure processing power, as the study of the universe is constantly pushing the barriers of what can be done regarding this metric. New and more advanced physical models produced by theoreticians require larger and more massively parallel computer clusters, and the availability of more powerful computers enables the development of advanced models, making it possible to deal with modeling problems that previously could not be solved.

The deployment at the University of São Paulo contains a total of 2,304 cores of AMD Opteron™ 6172 processors, each with 12 cores running at 2.1GHz and contains over 4.6TB of main memory. With AMD Opteron 6100 Series processor support, the Altix ICE 8400 is now capable of delivering up to 1,536 processor cores in a single rack, and can seamlessly scale from 32 to 65,536 compute nodes. Additionally, the Altix ICE 8400 now provides up to 14.13 teraflops of compute capability and up to 8.192 terabytes of memory per rack!

The momentum continues with SGI and AMD as we now offer full and immediate support of the newly released AMD Opteron 6100 Series processor models across our entire scale-out server lineup. This includes Altix ICE HPC clusters, CloudRack™ and Rackable™ scale-out servers, and SGI InfiniteStorage servers. For information about specific configurations and pricing, please visit SGI at www.sgi.com/amd.

Bill Mannel, vice president of product marketing at SGI. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.