SGI Customers Accelerate Research Efforts With New AMD Opteron™ 6200 Series Processors

SGI (NASDAQ:SGI), the trusted leader in technical computing, has begun shipping to customers worldwide its SGI® Rackable™ and SGI® ICE server lines incorporating AMD Opteron™ 6200 series processors (NYSE:AMD). These servers are in use across a broad range of applications, including astrophysics; earth sciences, including climatology and seismology; homeland security; and cloud storage.

The SGI ICE 8400 was launched with AMD Opteron 6100 Series processors in November 2010, allowing customers to enjoy world-renowned SGI quality and performance in the HPC-optimized, large scale-out platform. The ICE server set world-record performance on the SPEC MPIM2007 and MPIL2007 (base and peak) benchmarks for systems based on AMD Opteron processors. It simply requires a socket-level upgrade to the new AMD Opteron 6200 Series processors. Supporting up to four different InfiniBand® networking topologies, the ICE platform with AMD processors is flexible for all customer applications.

“Our customers are using their AMD-powered SGI servers to break new barriers in research and engineering,” said Bill Mannel, vice president of product marketing at SGI. “With industry-leading core counts, the AMD Opteron 6000 Series processors allow applications needing multiple cores to achieve optimal price, performance and density.”

At James Cook University in Australia, researchers are using SGI Rackable servers to better understand tropical climates and the impact of global warming on the Great Barrier Reef (http://www.jcu.edu.au/research). With more than 46 percent of Australia’s land mass in the tropics, it’s a center for research into tropical climates, medicine, wildlife, and coral reefs.

The University of São Paolo in Brazil purchased a 2,304-core SGI ICE 8400 for astronomy research in March 2011. “The computing power, with more cores than the SGI ICE 8400 system with AMD Opteron 6000 Series processors, enables us to dramatically increase the scale and scope of the problems we are studying,” said Dr. Alex C. Carciofi, professor in the Astronomy Department of the University of São Paulo. “This is helping us to understand more about this vast universe in which we all live.”

“SGI server and storage solutions built with AMD Opteron 6200 Series processors will provide scale and flexibility to a diverse field of HPC challenges,” said Paul Struhsaker, corporate vice president and general manager, Commercial Business at AMD. “Customers are demanding more compute and power-efficient cores, and SGI provides the systems with the software, support and services to enable them.”

SGI Rackable and ICE server lines with AMD Opteron 6200 Series processors are shipping now.

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