SEL selects SGI to accelerate creation of advanced R&D technology solutions

FREMONT, USA: SGI, a trusted leader in technical computing, announced that Japan’s Semiconductor Energy Laboratory (SEL) has purchased a high performance computing (HPC) solution consisting of an SGI Altix ICE 8400 to accelerate the research and development of semiconductor technology.

The system will have 3,840 processor cores built with Intel Xeon processor 5600 series, along with up to 15TB of memory, and is projected to achieve up to a ten-fold increase in application performance over the previous solution. It will be used for research and development work on thin-film integrated circuits, liquid crystal and electroluminescent displays, semiconductor thin-film transistors, solar cells, and batteries.

“Having previously used an SGI Altix 4700 system, we wanted the fastest available cluster system for achieving the results we need, and expect to gain up to ten times the application performance over our previous system,” said Shunpei Yamazaki, President of Semiconductor Energy Laboratory. “We expect to achieve these results and more with this new system, to the benefit of our customers and the end users of the technologies we will be able to create.”

Semiconductor Energy Laboratory referenced both SGI’s history of product performance, and in particular, SGI Japan’s technical support and the value of their ongoing relationship in choosing SGI for this new deployment. The system is expected to be in place and operational in July 2011.

"The business-critical technical computing challenges our customers face demand solutions that offer a dramatic increase in speed and performance," said Nobuhiko Nakatsu, president of SGI Japan. "With the SGI Altix ICE 8400 series we are able to offer our customers the high end of design and development compute solutions in a very flexible and robust platform.”

“Semiconductor research and development applications benefit from the raw computing performance delivered by the Intel Xeon processor 5600 series,” Rajeeb Hazra, general manager of High Performance Computing at Intel. “We’re excited to see more customers benefit from the SGI Altix 8400 series’ capability to scale out to support HPC applications like those being run at SEL.”