Swedish National Supercomputing Center to Tackle Large-Scale Problems With New SGI Altix System
Researchers Work to Simulate Electrical Properties of Low-Cost Alternative to Silicon
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Feb. 28 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Swedish researchers today announced they have installed the country's largest shared-memory supercomputer, a new 64-processor SGI(R) Altix(R) system equipped with half a Terabyte of memory. Deployed this month at the National Supercomputing Center (NSC) at Linkoping University (LiU), the new supercomputer from Silicon Graphics (OTC: SGID) will allow physicists and other researchers from throughout Sweden to break through computational barriers created by complex computations.
The first project slated for the NSC's new SGI(R) Altix(R) 3700 Bx2 may help researchers revolutionize the manufacture of 'organic electronics' that could serve as a low-cost, easily manufactured alternative to silicon. The more LiU researchers can learn about the crystal structure of such systems, the better they can assess the ability of organic materials to reliably carry electrical charges. The project aims to simulate disorders that can hinder an organic material's conductive properties. Accurately simulating these properties will give scientists insight into the potential for use in the kind of low-cost processors found in a growing array of applications -- from printed electronics to next-generation displays.
To quickly compute a large set of correlated random numbers that describe the disorder in organic materials, NSC's computational physics simulation requires 150GB of globally addressable memory, an amount no existing NSC supercomputer or cluster could provide. Throughout Sweden, researchers tap into a broad network of NSC clusters that together offer a total of 1,500 processors. Although the largest NSC cluster boasts 400GB of memory, the distributed nature of traditional Linux(R) clusters makes it impossible for applications to efficiently hold the entire problem in memory.
In recent years, Swedish researchers used a previously installed SGI(R) server with 128GB of shared memory. But escalating needs and rapidly growing data sets prompted NSC administrators to seek out a new, more powerful shared-memory supercomputer that uses a 64-bit Linux operating environment.
'Our primary need was for a large, shared-memory system,' said Sven Stafstrom, NSC director and professor of computational physics at the University of Linkoping. Last year, Stafstrom surveyed nearly 50 user groups throughout Sweden on their high-performance computing (HPC) needs, and particularly on their need for a shared-memory resource. 'The survey showed that throughout the NSC network, there is growing demand for such a supercomputer, because our cluster systems lack shared-memory capabilities. About 20 percent of the researchers we surveyed said they wanted to access 200GB of shared-memory right away. Now, for the first time, we can provide that.'........
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