SGI introduced a HPC-grade, extreme performance storage system, which was selected for a 24-Teraflop HPC system in South Australia.

SGI announced the release of SGI InfiniteStorage 17000 for extreme data volumes, high performance computing (HPC) and data-intensive real-time workloads. The InfiniteStorage 17000 model is a single-platform RAID storage system with throughput of over 40GB/s and 1.4 million flash IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second).

"SGI customers routinely push the edge in performance and scalability requirements for storage systems," said Jose Reinoso, vice president of storage engineering at SGI. "SGI InfiniteStorage 17000 is a platform that reliably addresses those needs and resets the bar for what to expect from a high-performance storage array."

Targeted at workflows that need extreme scale and performance, it has the ability to scale a single system to over 1,680 disk drives and 6.72 petabytes. SGI has already began implementing a multi-rack, 8,000 drive installation in Europe of the InfinititeStorage 17000.

"As technical computing platforms have seen dramatic increases in density and performance, the I/O requirements are also becoming increasingly randomized and driving the need for greater throughput and higher IOPS," said Laura DuBois, program vice oresident at IDC "With InfiniteStorage 17000, SGI is addressing those challenges with the performance and density needed to keep up with such demands."

SGI looks to be launching a new Big Data appliance soon, as a recent Facebook post was soliciting ideas for what to name the appliance that would ingest and crunch any kind of data for analysis.

SGI Selected for Australian HPC

SGI announced that eResearch SA, the leading provider of eResearch technologies for researchers in South Australia selected SGI to provide infrastructure for its new high-performance computing system, the Tizard machine. The system consists of 48 compute nodes each with 128GB of memory, 17 nodes utilising 68 GPUs with NVIDI M2090 Tesla cards and two large memory nodes with 512GB and 1024GB of memory. With 2,304 cores it is expected to deliver 24 Teraflops.

"The Tizard machine represents an exciting new era in South Australia's eResearch capability," said Dr Paul Coddington, deputy director of eResearch SA. "The Tizard will be of immense value to researchers at the University of Adelaide, University of South Australia, Flinders University and State Government research facilities and groups, providing a much wider range of computing modes and overall power than eRSA's existing supercomputer."