NASA to use giant SGI Linux Itanium cluster

A CLUSTER OF 20 supercomputers each of which uses 512 Itanium 2 microprocessors will be used by NASA to chart space, Silicon Graphics said.

The system consists of twenty 512 CPU SGI Altix systems, using 500TB Infinite Storage, amounting to 10,240 Itanium 2s in all.

The computers will power the Space Exploration Simulator which runs on the Linux operating system.

The Space Exploration Simulator will live at the Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, said SGI, which has already delivered the first three Altix systems to NASA.

The Altix uses SGI NUMAlink interconnect, and that allows global addressing of all memory in the system. SGI claims that this will shuttle data across nodes 200 times faster than conventional interconnects.

The next step for NASAkind and for SGI will be to re-jig the Altix architecture to globally address memory across 2,048 processors in one system, SGI said. µ