As a leader in computationally intensive computing, SGI tends to set the pace for the large memory systems often required to crunch the numbers in massive data sets. In a recent press release, we announced that our Altix systems have now achieved 21 Terabytes of globally addressable memory at customer sites. I’d like to explain what this means in more depth and offer examples.
The Altix 450/4700 (Itanium) systems can accommodate 128 terabytes of globally shared memory under the control of a single instance of the Linux operating system. The system may also be partitioned among multiple instances of Linux and provide globally addressable shared memory among OS instances via SGI’s unique NUMAlink® interconnect technology. What this means to the customer is essentially saving time: time-to-results, time-to-solution and time-to-innovation. It significantly simplifies application development and debugging for all parallel programming models be it OpenMP, pthreads, MPI or SHMEM.
In addition, it offers an integrated platform for application fusion, which enables running a mix of different applications and workloads. As workloads usually change during the project life-cycle, a global shared memory platform lowers TCO compared to clusters that require node reconfiguration.
We have seen great success for memory-resident database applications with uses in Internet data centers and transaction processing; as well as those based on “graph theory,” an important area of mathematics with uses in defense and homeland security applications, multi-disciplinary science, and data assimilation. Some customers who are already seeing the advantages of the SGI Altix product line are:
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base: the laboratory here uses an SGI Altix 4700 system with 4,608 Intel Itanium processors in a single supercomputer equipped with 20 TB of globally addressable memory and 440 TB of usable disk space. Globally addressable memory means applications can be shared across various operating systems via SGI NUMAlink. One of the largest computers in the Department of Defense, the SGI resource helps DoD researchers to design faster, reduce risk by increasing the quality of modeling and simulation, and support an intensifying effort to develop “game-changing” computational science and engineering applications.
The Leibniz Supercomputing Centre Munich (LRZ): This facility operates a 4,864 Intel Itanium processor system with slightly over 39 TB of globally addressable memory that is hard at work solving increasingly complex simulations in physics and astrophysics, materials research, fluid dynamics, chemistry, geosciences and biological sciences.
Click here for more information about SGI® Altix® Itanium globally addressable memory capabilities, or click here for the press release.