Imperial College London Selects SGI to Accelerate Academic Research

SGI (NASDAQ:SGI), a global leader in HPC and data center solutions, today announced that Imperial College London, one of the UK’s most prestigious educational establishments, has selected SGI Altix ICE 8200 EX, a Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) solution, to add to its central high performance computing (HPC) service.

Consistently rated among the world's best universities, Imperial is a science-based institution with a global reputation for high quality teaching and academic research. Imperial College required an advanced computing solution for students and researchers to conduct course work and research that depend on extremely complex process modeling. The college selected the SGI dual-rail Infiniband supercomputer, Altix ICE 8200 EX, which uses the latest Intel® Xeon® Nehalem processors.

The SGI installation will act as 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 modeling. The new system also acts as a stepping stone to the national academic supercomputer service HECToR (High End Computing Terascale Resources).

“Due to the complex nature of the target applications, speed, performance and low latency are critical factors for our HPC users,” said Simon Burbidge, HPC coordination manager at Imperial College London. “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.”

SGI will provide dedicated in-house application expertise to Imperial College London as part of the technology partnership to help port and optimize key codes onto the new SGI architecture.

“Imperial College London is at the absolute forefront of technological development and scientific understanding,” said Rod Evans, vice president of sales for Northern Europe at SGI. “Altix ICE will help drive its academic research to new levels with highly reliable, extremely energy efficient and scalable hardware, allowing them to continually evolve their HPC capabilities.”

SGI Altix ICE supercomputers are designed-to-order for data-intensive computing. Featuring integrated blade architecture, Altix ICE supports extremely high densities – up to 512 processor cores in a single rack – and is easily scalable to thousands of nodes, making it an ideal solution for the most challenging computing problems. In addition, the Altix ICE blade architecture offers unique technologies like diskless nodes and integrated backplanes, which not only enhance reliability, but reduce operating costs by reducing power expended for cooling.

About SGI

SGI is a global leader in large-scale clustered computing, high performance storage, HPC, data center enablement and services. SGI is focused on helping customers solve their most demanding business and technology challenges. Visit www.sgi.com for more information.

About Imperial College London

Consistently rated amongst the world's best universities, Imperial College London is a science-based institution with a reputation for excellence in teaching and research that attracts 14,000 students and 6,000 staff of the highest international quality. Innovative research at the College explores the interface between science, medicine, engineering and business, delivering practical solutions that improve quality of life and the environment – underpinned by a dynamic enterprise culture.

Since its foundation in 1907, Imperial's contributions to society have included the discovery of penicillin, the development of holography and the foundations of fiber optics. This commitment to the application of research for the benefit of all continues today, with current focuses including interdisciplinary collaborations to improve health in the UK and globally, tackle climate change, and develop clean and sustainable sources of energy. For more information, please visit http://www.imperial.ac.uk.

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