SGI continues exascale move with integration of Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 family

FREMONT, USA: SGI announced that it is continuing its march toward exascale computing with the integration of the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 family into all of its high performance compute (HPC) server and storage platforms and product families. Full support for the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 family in the SGI Rackable, SGI ICE X HPC and SGI Modular InfiniteStorage (MIS) platforms is also now available.

SGI has been shipping Rackable servers to its public cloud customers since September 2011, and is shipping 26.73 teraflops per rack this month in its ICE X platform. The MIS server platform represents the densest storage server platform in the industry today, and is based solely on the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 family. As the most flexible, high-performance computing platform in the industry, the SGI Rackable line takes advantage of the new Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 family to drive the most dramatic performance improvements in a typical product generation - in some cases up to 2X¹ and beyond the performance of the previous generation for high-performance computing (HPC) workloads.

The SGI Rackable line has led the HPC industry by providing the first power-optimized Hadoop cluster available. With improvements to the power management capability for the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 family, this performance extends further, now providing one of the most energy efficient solutions in the industry. With new features of the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 family, including the integration of the PCI-E generation 3.0 controller into the socket, the Rackable line is completely redefined with higher levels of CPU core count density and I/O slot density than previous generation of Rackable servers.

“Our computing resources provide support for the groundbreaking research conducted by the members of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest and most complex scientific instrument ever conceived,” said Sérgio Novaes, head of the Center for Scientific Computing at the Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). “We depend on having the finest compute technologies at our disposal for our strategic initiatives, and we are happy to have received the necessary financial support from FAPESP, the Sao Paulo Research Foundation, which allowed us to upgrade our systems to the new Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 family. This upgrade will ensure that we stay on the leading edge of high performance computing well into the future.”

Built entirely on industry-standard hardware and software components, SGI ICE X is the latest generation of the world’s fastest distributed memory platform, and is being adopted by many companies due to its superior performance, standards-based operation, and ease of use. With the new Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 family, ICE X delivers up to 2,304 processor cores – over 22 teraflops of compute power – per rack, easily scaling from 36 to tens of thousands of nodes to address the world’s most challenging compute problems.

“SGI focuses on speed and scale,” said Bill Mannel, VP of product marketing at SGI. “The E5-2600 family is the perfect ‘engine’ under the hood for our products. The SGI Rackable line, ICE X high performance compute line, and storage servers with Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 family will be ideal for private enterprise workloads as well as public cloud, Hadoop and HPC. Based upon our measurements, replacing 2007 systems with those based upon this new processor will yield up to a 66 percent reduction in their total cost of ownership (TCO).”

The SGI Modular InfiniteStorage platform is an integrated server and storage system designed to provide extreme flexibility with industry-leading density in an innovative, adaptable design. SGI engineers have incorporated breakthrough modular hardware innovations, leveraging SGI's experience in building some of the world's most powerful compute platforms, to give SGI Modular InfiniteStorage the industry's widest range of functional compute and storage scalability within the same base platform. Each of the two compute engines in the SGI MIS Server product line provides dual socket capability and will be populated with one or two processors from the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 family.