Fastest, Most Scalable Shared Memory Supercomputer Supports up to 16TB of Global Shared Memory in a Single System Image

SGI today announced it has shipped the first complete systems of Altix UV 1000, which are fully functional for use by its high performance computing (HPC) customers. Those among the first to benefit from Altix UV include leading scientific research institutions such as Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ), University of Cambridge and leading federal integrators that have selected Altix UV for its unprecedented performance, scalability and open architecture.

“These shipments of Altix UV are a major milestone for our customers and SGI,” said Mark J. Barrenechea, SGI CEO. “The Altix UV platform is transformative to how customers can deploy the next generation of computing for the world’s most demanding work loads, including traditional HPC, databases, I/O and cyber security.”

Altix UV delivers unmatched scalability with up to 2,048 cores with architectural provisioning for up to 262,144 cores, and supports up to 16 terabytes (TB) of global shared memory in a single system image (SSI). Altix UV leverages NUMAlink 5, SGI's high speed 15GB per second interconnect, and MPI Offload Engine (MOE) acceleration for superior performance. Altix UV is ideal for open source, custom and commercial HPC applications, and enterprise databases, as well as scalable I/O, data analytics and cyber security workloads.

“As one of the first users of Altix UV, we are excited to continue to work with SGI to explore the many new computational capabilities that are now available to the scientific community with its introduction,” said Michael Levine, scientific director at Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. “The Altix UV product line allows for unmatched scalability and performance for demanding, shared memory applications, and greatly expands the range of HPC computing capabilities.”

Altix UV is built on open standard technologies from Intel Xeon to Linux. The system’s x86 architecture incorporates the latest Intel Xeon series 7500 processors, and supports out of the box Novell SUSE or Red Hat Linux operating systems.

“Supercomputing centers demand outstanding performance on a wide range of workloads. By shipping Altix UV systems, SGI has innovatively leveraged the scalability, memory capacity and efficient performance of the Intel Xeon 7500 processor series to satisfy a wide range of high performance computing application requirements,” said Richard Dracott, general manager of high performance computing at Intel. “Intel has worked in close engineering cooperation with SGI to enable this, and we are excited to see this product in the market.”

SGI’s comprehensive management and performance software stack is available on all Altix UV systems for a consistent user experience.

Availability and Pricing

Altix UV is shipping immediately. Pricing can be provided upon request. For more information, please visit www.sgi.com/AltixUV.