COSMOS & Miracle Consortia Select SGI Technology To Close In On The Big Bang & Exoplanets

SGI (NASDAQ: SGI), the trusted leader in technical computing, today announced that COSMOS and Miracle Consortia have selected SGI as its preferred technology partner for their shared-memory node, as part of the STFC funded DiRAC collaboration. This is a continuation of the national service offered by Stephen Hawking’s COSMOS Consortium, based at the University of Cambridge. This announcement enlarges and extends a long-standing relationship between SGI and the COSMOS Consortium, and will allow these interdisciplinary organisations to solve some of the most complex computing challenges of our time and find answers to astoundingly big questions.

The STFC funded DiRAC HPC collaboration has agreed that this shared memory machine is one of its highest priorities. The funding is planned as part of the recent announcement of investment by the UK Government of £158M in e-infrastructure.

“The collaboration with SGI will enable researchers using the COSMOS supercomputer across the UK to advance their ambitious programme of research in both cosmology and exoplanets,” said Professor Paul Shellard, director, Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge. “The incredible flexibility and scalability of this next-generation shared memory high performance computing solution from SGI accelerates our work exploiting large data sets and tackling complex simulations.”

The latest SGI® UV™ system selected will include 1856 cores of Intel® Xeon® family processors and 14.8 terabytes of cache coherent shared memory in five racks. Intel is providing up to 32 Many Integrated Core (MIC) co-processors in this configuration, and the system will include the latest NUMAlink® 6 interconnect technology, optimized for ultra-low latency data access as well fast general purpose communication.

“We have had the pleasure of working with the COSMOS Consortium since 1997,” said SGI CEO Ronald D. Verdoorn. “Now, fifteen years later and initiating their ninth generation of system upgrades, we remain committed to their ongoing success as they help unravel and understand the complexities of the origins of our universe.”