Flash and other storage-class memory (SCM) technologies can revolutionize the data center and cloud computing but they have significant performance, reliability, and serviceability problems. These problems compound in large-scale deployments of SSDs, requiring a cohesive Tier-0 framework for a systematic build-out. Virident Systems products solve these problems.

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Games That Matter

One such popular defense tool is a virtual world game called Boarders Ahoy!. Developed by NATO's Allied Command Transformation, the training simulator prepares sailors for boarding a ship as part of a military inspection process. Users can practice interviewing the crew of the virtual ship, checking identification and locating the game's 250 searchable objects.

The United States Secret Service is also leveraging the training power of virtual worlds to prepare for national threats. "Tiny Town" is a small-scale model in use for the last four decades, which helps officials plan for such emergencies as chemical threats and enemy attacks. The model now has a 3D computer-generated counterpart, called Virtual Tiny Town. The software's advanced modeling cabilities can realistically simulate a variety of possible real-life threats, such as chemical, biological or radiological attacks, armed assaults, or suicide bombers. Planned upgrades will enhance the program's life-saving measures by adding health impacts and crowd behaviors to the model.

Academic institutions are also contributing to the arsenal of public safety measures. The recently-launched Center for Advanced Modeling in the Social, Behavioral and Health Sciences at Johns Hopkins University specializes in agent-based simulation, which predicts how individuals will react in emergency situations. The center draws from diverse disciplines, such as public safety, sociology, economics and supercomputing, to fine-tune its virtual model.

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SGI Announces Next-Generation Altix ICE Scale-Out Supercomputer

SGI, a global leader in HPC and datacenter solutions, today announced the immediate availability of Altix ICE 8400, the next generation of the award-winning Altix ICE scale-out high performance computing (HPC) blade platform. SGI also announced today it has submitted world record breaking SPEC benchmark performance results with Altix ICE 8400, demonstrating its readiness to implement multi-petascale supercomputers.

Altix ICE 8400 contains significant enhancements over prior Altix ICE generations, including through and through Quad Data Rate InfiniBand interconnect. SGI's elegantly-designed integrated backplane sports up to three times the link-to-node bandwidth relative to competitive QDR InfiniBand clusters to maximize performance where most job traffic occurs. Altix ICE 8400 supports up to 128 processors (1,536 cores) per cabinet with support for 130W CPU sockets. Three on-board Mellanox ConnectX-2 InfiniBand HCA compute blade configurations are also supported, and include single-port, dual-port or two single-port chipsets.

Altix ICE 8400, with its innovative blade design, easily and affordably scales to up to 65,536 compute nodes with integrated single or dual plane InfiniBand backplane interconnect. Open x86 architecture makes it equally simple to deploy commercial, open source or custom applications on completely unmodified Novell SUSE or Red Hat Linux operating systems.

Altix ICE 8400 easily meets the needs of the world's largest supercomputing deployments. Recognized for its design win at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at Ames Research Center, SGI helps Pleiades Supercomputer, the world's largest InfiniBand cluster, scale with an additional 32 cabinets of Altix ICE 8400 to nearly a petaflop. The system fully leverages SGI's hypercube topology to enable seamless cabinet-level upgrades without any production downtime, saving millions of core hours in the process.

(Full version of this article can be obtained from HPCwire's web pages)