SGI Named 2012 Computerworld Honors Laureate

SGI (NASDAQ:SGI), the trusted leader in technical computing, announced today that IDG's Computerworld Honors® Program has named the company a 2012 Laureate. The recognition is based on SGI’s work with NASA and the Pleiades supercomputer installed at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. The annual award program honors visionary applications of information technology promoting positive social, economic and educational change.

NAS is NASA’s primary supercomputing center, and Pleiades (named after the astronomical open star cluster of the same name) is part of the High-End Computing Capability ( HECC) Project, which provides users with an integrated computing environment including both the computational resources and services supporting efficient use of the systems. Pleiades, which ranks seventh on the current TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers, represents NASA's state-of-the-art technology for meeting the agency's supercomputing requirements, enabling NASA scientists and engineers to conduct modeling and simulation for NASA missions.

“Pleiades has been a game changer at NASA,” said William Thigpen, HECC deputy project manager at Ames. “NASA scientists and engineers are able to attack problems at a scale that was not possible prior to the Pleiades installation, and the system’s evolution continues to reduce the time to solution on problems ranging from climate simulation to launch vehicle design.”

The system architecture is manufactured by SGI, and consists of 112,896 total cores (32,768 additional GPU cores), with a total memory of 191 terabytes. The newest generation of supercomputer, SGI® ICE™ X, continues the heritage of previous ICE designs in implementing hierarchical management and hypercube networking topologies. This allows easy system expansion over time, including over multiple generations, with no system down time while expansion is taking place. This feature has saved NASA over two million hours of compute time during previous system upgrades.

“NASA is at the leading edge of high performance computing and touches the lives of billions of people worldwide on a daily basis,” said Franz Aman, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at SGI. “From health care and hurricane tracking, analysis of Earth’s oceans and seas, to the quest for life on other planets, scientists and citizens alike depend on Pleiades and eagerly await the next discovery enabled by this system. We’re honored to be recognized for our work with NASA, and share this award in spirit with them and the teams there who benefit us all.”

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