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September 2007 Archives

September 3, 2007

SGI Sets World Record for Oracle E-Business Suite Performance

SGI, a provider of high-performance server and storage solutions, has announced verified test results that show SGI Altix to be the industry's fastest, most scalable Linux system for real-world, multi-tier applications running Oracle Database 10g. The company said it delivered the best "All Linux" benchmark result with a medium-sized Oracle Database 10g.

Running the Oracle E-Business Suite 11i (11.5.10) Benchmark, also known as the Oracle Applications Standard Benchmark (OASB), an SGI Altix 450 system delivered twice the performance of the previous record holder in tests that measure average response times for 2,000 online users. The SGI system also delivered record hourly throughput in Oracle's measurement of order management and payroll batch business processes.
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Posted on September 3, 2007 6:23 PM |

September 5, 2007

SGI Supercomputing Solutions Enable Professor Stephen Hawking's UK Cosmos Consortium to Shed Light on the Structure of the Universe

READING, UK and SUNNYVALE, Calif., Sept. 5 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- To take advantage of substantial increases in speed and energy efficiency, the COSMOS consortium which has been using SGI(R) high-performance computing (HPC) solutions since 1997, has upgraded its system with the purchase of a 152-core, 456GB SGI(R) Altix(R) 4700 shared-memory system from SGI . Professor Stephen Hawking's UK COSMOS consortium is Europe's leading group of investigators studying all aspects of cosmology-from simulating the origins of the universe to investigating theories of how we see it today. The consortium, which is supported by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), includes 28 investigators at ten UK institutions, as well as international collaborators who are able to make use of its resources. Substantial increases in speed and energy efficiency, compared to its previous Altix 3700 system were crucial in securing funding for the upgrade. More

Posted on September 5, 2007 4:05 PM |

September 7, 2007

With SGI Altix ICE, University of Exeter Aims for the Stars - and Hopes to Learn How They Are Born

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Sept. 6 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- British astrophysicists at the University of Exeter know how trying it can be to simulate the birthing ground of new stars. Using 16 processors of a supercomputer located at another university, the scientists needed an entire year to model a cloud of hydrogen and helium gas so vast it would take a beam of light four years to travel from one end to another. The Exeter scientists found that waiting for results on this resource hobbled their productivity, so to tackle one of the remaining fundamental problems of astrophysics they turned to SGI(R) Altix(R) ICE, a new, high-performance computing (HPC) blade system from SGI (NASDAQ: SGIC) . When the 128-core, 16TB SGI(R) Altix(R) ICE 8200 system arrived at the university's campus in June, Exeter realized its wait was over. "Our new SGI Altix ICE system was up and running the afternoon it arrived, and we began running benchmarks within 48 hours," said Matthew Bate, professor of theoretical astrophysics at the University of Exeter. "The system manager began training on it the next morning. When a university can achieve rapid productivity on a powerful system like this, it makes for some very excited researchers." More

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Posted on September 7, 2007 11:33 AM |

Wright-Pat supercomputer tackles complex research

DAYTON - The Defense Department's newest, most powerful supercomputer is crunching numbers at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, helping military researchers design new weapons systems and more quickly solve problems on the battlefield. Nicknamed the Hawk, the SGI Altix 4700 bristles with 9,000 processors and takes up 1,200 square feet of space. It eclipses a 6,000-processor system run by the Army at a research lab in Aberdeen, Md., said Steve Wourms, director of the Major Shared Resource Center. More

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Posted on September 7, 2007 11:35 AM |

September 10, 2007

Intel Brief: Supercomputing in China

It is unlikely that China will use the IBM System p575 purchased to aid weather forecasting in advance and during the 2008 Olympics in Beijing for weapons development after the Olympics due to the country's ability to domestically produce machines that run at faster speeds. ..... There is a history of China defense organizations acquiring US-made supercomputers. In 1997, Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, reported US-based Silicon Graphics, Inc sold a supercomputer to the Chinese Academy of Sciences without an export license, which, in turn, China used to help develop the country's long-range missiles. The same company reportedly sold systems to a nuclear laboratory in Chelyabinsk, Russia without an export license as well. More

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Posted on September 10, 2007 8:15 PM |

September 11, 2007

NASA's Aeronautics Research to Get Boost from SGI Altix ICE and InfiniteStorage Solution

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Sept. 10 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- NASA has turned to SGI (NASDAQ: SGIC) for a large-scale high-performance computing (HPC) cluster and storage solution to support computational work essential to aeronautics research. Within its Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate (ARMD), NASA faces rapidly escalating demand from scientists for computer time and associated resources to store and manage the results of their computational analyses. To meet that need, the agency acquired an SGI(R) Altix(R) ICE blade system powered by 4,096 Intel(R) Xeon(R) processor cores and 4 Terabytes (TB) of memory. NASA also purchased a new SGI(R) InfiniteStorage 10000 solution capable of managing 240TB of data -- an amount three times larger than the entire print collection of the Library of Congress. More

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Posted on September 11, 2007 1:07 PM |

September 12, 2007

SGI Strengthens Leadership Team

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Sept. 11 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- SGI (NASDAQ: SGIC) today announced that Shahin Khan has been appointed vice president of Corporate Strategy. A well-respected figure in the industry, Khan will spearhead corporate development, strategic alliances, and manage the company's Intellectual Property (IP) portfolio. ........ Khan has served in executive positions at Sun Microsystems, including vice president of the High Performance and Technical Computing business unit, chief competitive officer, and vice president of Product Marketing and Planning for computer systems. He was most recently chief marketing officer at Electronics for Imaging, and prior to that served in a similar role at Azul Systems. More

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Posted on September 12, 2007 1:32 PM |

September 13, 2007

Polar Research Institute scientists leverage SGI technology for global climate change study

March 1, 2007, to March 1, 2008, marks the fourth International Polar Year (IPY) -- a large scientific program focused on research in both polar caps, the Arctic and the Antarctic, to recognize the strong links these regions have with the global climate changes. This year's activities mark China's first IPY efforts, and the Polar Research Institute of China (PRIC) selected compute technology from SGI (NASDAQ:SGIC) to enable this important scientific research mission. More

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Posted on September 13, 2007 12:01 PM |

September 17, 2007

Naval Surface Warfare Center Selects SGI Altix for Modeling of Warhead Impact

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Sept. 17 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- When scientists and engineers at the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) in Indian Head, Maryland needed to ensure they could make reliable, qualitative predictions regarding the vulnerability and survivability of targets for U.S. Navy warheads, they turned to SGI for a solution. To obtain accurate assessments of predicted target damage, the NSWC required a high performance server that would allow them to conduct large three dimensional computations for faster 3D analysis of explosive systems. The group found such a system in the SGI(R) Altix(R) 4700. More

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Posted on September 17, 2007 4:34 PM |

September 20, 2007

SGI Advanced Linux Environment Multiple Updates

SGI has issued multiple updates for SGI Advanced Linux Environment. These fix some vulnerabilities, which can be exploited by malicious people to conduct cross-site scripting attacks, cause a DoS (Denial of Service), and potentially compromise a vulnerable system. More

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Posted on September 20, 2007 12:01 PM |

September 21, 2007

NCAR Hosts Computing in Atmospheric Sciences Workshop

Computer experts, scientists, and industry leaders gathered in Annecy, France September 9-13, 2007 to discuss the status and future of high-performance computing for weather prediction and climate modeling. The four-day meeting drew 80 participants and covered topics including hurricane and tsunami prediction, weather prediction, climate change, and challenges and advances in computing technologies. Practical applications extend as far as accurate weather forecasting for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, China. Industry representatives at the conference included AMD, Cray, IBM, Intel, NEC, SGI, and Sun Microsystems, all of whom provided corporate sponsorship to partially support the meeting. More

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Posted on September 21, 2007 1:04 PM |

September 22, 2007

The World's Biggest SANs

We at Byte and Switch are on the trail of the world's biggest SAN, and this article reveals our initial findings. There are several reasons we've embarked on the search for gargantuan storage networks. For one, large SANs push the envelope. If I'm looking to expand a network of 5 Tbytes, what better way than to study the fate of those who've gone above the petabyte level? Big SAN stories furnish a glimpse into the outer limits of scaleability. (Some interesting details are in this article, about the SGI SAN that supports Columbia, and the other large SGI SAN at LANL that supports ASCII Purple) More

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Posted on September 22, 2007 1:26 PM |

September 25, 2007

SEG 2007 Post-Convention Workshop: HPC in Seismic Imaging

The SEG 2007 Post-Convention workshop "High Performance Computing in Seismic Imaging" will take place Sept. 28th from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center in San Antonio, Texas. (Among the topics discussed will be) Technology directions -- presentations will be from technology leaders in the high-performance computing industry. Presenters include Richard Kaufmann (HP High Performance Computing), Eng Lim Goh (SGI CTO) and Garth Gibson (Panasas CTO). More

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Posted on September 25, 2007 8:35 AM |

September 26, 2007

SGI InfiniteStorage NEXIS Family Delivers High-Performance and Scalability With Enterprise-Class Ease of Management

NEW YORK, Sept. 26 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Storage Decisions Booth 402 -- To address explosive data growth plaguing businesses, government and research institutions, SGI today unveiled the SGI(R) InfiniteStorage NEXIS NAS family focused on making high-performance storage technology easier to use. At the heart of the SGI InfiniteStorage NEXIS NAS family is SGI's highly efficient XFS(R) file system, repurposed for NAS appliance simplicity, and SGI(R) InfiniteStorage Appliance Manager, a new graphical-user interface for optimizing storage resources, managing growth and allowing the set-up of base NAS configurations in less than 20 minutes. More

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Posted on September 26, 2007 2:19 PM |

September 27, 2007

New Brazilian University Purchases Largest Shared-Memory Supercomputer in Latin America

NEW YORK, Sept. 27 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Storage Decisions Booth 402 -- To speed cutting-edge scientific research and attract top-tier professors and researchers, Brazil's Universidade Federal do ABC (UFABC) purchased in May a high-performance compute and storage system from SGI . The SGI(R) Altix(R) is the very first HPC system that the brand new university has acquired for their Supercomputing Center, and will be used to run data intensive and computationally intensive applications in nanoscience, materials science, engineering, chemistry and physics. Founded in 2005 and opening its doors one year ago, UFABC is located in the Sao Paulo industrial belt and is focused on basic sciences and technology. The university is divided into three Centers: the Center for Natural Sciences, the Engineering Center, and the Mathematics and Computational Sciences Center. All three will access the compute power of the SGI(R) Altix(R) 4700 system with 272GB RAM, backed by 30TB of SGI InfiniteStorage. More

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Posted on September 27, 2007 2:27 PM |

September 29, 2007

Silicon Graphics: still crazy after all these years?

In 1982 a first class stamp cost 20 cents, the San Francisco 49ers won the Super Bowl and the unemployment rate was 9.7 percent when Jim Clark (far left) quit as a Stanford engineering professor to develop glitzy workstations at the startup called Silicon Graphics. On Monday, October 1, the company Clark built will celebrate its 25th anniversary at an evening reception at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. More (In case you're not aware, the Computer History Museum is SGI's old data centre)

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Posted on September 29, 2007 9:46 AM |

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About September 2007

This page contains all entries posted to SiliconBunny News in September 2007. They are listed from oldest to newest.

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