CESCA, the Catalonia Supercomputing Centre, has chosen the SGI Altix UV 1000 for its HPC system to enable advanced scientific research in the areas of medical and environmental research, and astronomy.
Requirements were an HPC system with a floating point of at least 10 Tflops, homogeneous architecture, and breakthrough energy efficiency and extreme scalability in cores, main memory and disk space. Consisting of 224 processors, each with six cores, at 2.67 GHz., 6.14 TB of main memory and 112 TB of disk memory, the Altix UV 1000 has a total of 1,344 cores and reaches a peak performance of 14.3 Tflops. It also provides a unique shared memory system that can be split in logic partitions and scale to hundreds of thousands of computing cores and PB of memory.
‘We selected SGI’s Altix UV 1000 because of the optimum benchmark results that could be delivered, and because a high-capacity nodes environment is more convenient for the kind of application executed by our users,’ commented Miquel Huguet, director of CESCA.
CESCA researchers will use the system on complex calculations to better understand mechanisms of the respiratory system; to find therapies that prevent the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) from entering the cells of an organism; to discover a way to weaken the agent that causes tuberculosis; and to better control radiation doses provided to patients in CAT (computerised axial tomography) examinations.
SGI’s Altix UV will also aid in their study of molecular magnetic properties with technology applications such as the storage of information at a molecular level, or the development of more efficient synthetic processes and environmental compliance studying organometallic catalysts. It will also allow the study of space-time to increase knowledge of solar storms and other phenomenon that alter the geospace in order to develop applications that allow accurate predictions, and reduce the effects on interplanetarium space, atmosphere and Earth.
