NASA has chosen SGI to supply its next major supercomputer, a 20,480-core SGI Altix ICE system, after a competitive evaluation the space agency launched last year.

The new SGI system, to be installed this summer in the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, presents vast new opportunities for scientists and engineers who are attempting to tackle some of the largest and most complex problems in history. The supercomputer will be capable of generating 245 trillion operations per second (Teraflops).

"Achieving such a monumental increase in performance will help fulfill NASA's increasing need for additional computing capacity and will enable us to provide the computational performance and capacity needed for future missions", stated Ames Director S. Pete Worden. "This additional computational performance is necessary to help us achieve breakthrough scientific discoveries."

NASA's plan to resume manned missions to the moon - and eventually manned exploration of Mars - is one of the chief reasons for securing a new, exceptionally powerful computing resource. In addition to space exploration, the new SGI supercomputer will support NASA's aeronautics, science and space operations initiatives.

NASA Ames, Intel and SGI will work together on a project called Pleiades to develop a computational system with a capacity of one Petaflops peak performance (1000 trillion operations per second) by 2009 and a system with a peak performance of 10 Petaflops (10,000 trillion operations per second) by 2012.

Powered by the latest Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors, the new supercomputer will feature more than 20,800 Gigabytes (GB) of system memory - equal to the memory found in 10,000 of today's desktop PCs. NASA also will deploy a next-generation SGI InfiniteStorage InfiniBand disk solution capable of storing and managing 450 Terabytes (TB) of data - an amount five times larger than the entire print collection of the Library of Congress. The installation also includes a 115TB SGI InfiniteStorage NEXIS Network Attached Storage solution.

"Throughout its history, NASA has sought to explore the most compelling questions about mankind, Earth, and the worlds that await our discovery", stated Robert "Bo" Ewald, chief executive officer of SGI. "SGI is proud to be part of this effort. These groundbreaking new systems powered by SGI and fueled by the latest multi-core Intel processors, offer a platform for new discoveries that will help us all achieve the most promising future for the human race. This effort is important to everyone on this planet."

This collaboration builds on the 2004 deployment of Columbia, which generated a tenfold increase in supercomputing capacity for the agency. Since then, Columbia has enabled a wide range of breakthroughs, including the preliminary design of a new launch vehicle that someday will carry astronauts back into space, weather models capable of predicting a hurricane's path up to five days before landfall, and a visualization of gravitational waves created by two colliding black holes.

Meeting NASA's future mission challenges will require additional computational resources to handle increasingly higher fidelity modelling and simulation. In 2009, NASA expects to increase that computing capability 16 times with the Pleiades project, and by an additional tenfold in 2012.

"Intel, working with SGI, is proud to play an important role in helping NASA expand the pursuit of scientific discovery", stated Diane M. Bryant, vice president of Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group and general manager of the Server Platforms Group. "Systems such as Pleiades challenge the imagination, and guide our exploration of Earth, space, and beyond. As we approach performance that was once thought impossible to achieve, our eyes are opened even wider to the vast possibilities enabled by supercomputing."

NASA's new Altix ICE system will be built from highly integrated blades enclosed in 40 racks, each equipped with 512 processor cores and 512GB of memory. Energy-smart and space-efficient, the dense, water-cooled SGI Altix ICE system will allow NASA to minimize its impact on the data centre - in terms of space, energy use and cooling costs. Cost savings aren't the only benefit. Compared to a typical server, a 10TFLOP SGI Altix ICE system can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by up to 293 metric tons every year - the environmental equivalent of pulling 53 passenger vehicles off the road.

The new system complements Columbia because it is especially suited to running applications that decompose into chunks that can be distributed across a supercomputer's many compute nodes, and a fast InfiniBand connection between those nodes guarantees high bandwidth and low latencies. Columbia is a shared-memory system, which means it can apply more memory to a single application and is optimized for problems that benefit most from SGI NUMAlink, the lowest latency interconnect in the industry. For this reason, both of NASA's SGI supercomputers may be used for a single project, depending on researchers' needs and application requirements.

When it is installed, NASA's new supercomputer will be one of the largest SGI Altix ICE systems ever deployed, joining the State of New Mexico's Encanto, a 14,336-core SGI Altix ICE system currently ranked as the third most powerful supercomputer in the world. The new NASA system will run Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10.