National Center for Atmospheric Research Selects SGI

MILPITAS, CA--(Marketwired - Jan 11, 2016) - SGI ( NASDAQ : SGI ), a global leader in high-performance solutions for compute, data analytics and data management, announced that the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) chose SGI to facilitate the development of more advanced climate and weather models. The new SGI® ICE™ XA system, named "Cheyenne," will perform some of the world's most data intensive calculations for weather and climate modeling to improve the resolution and precision by orders of magnitude. As a result, NCAR's scientists will provide more actionable projections about the impact of climate change for specific regions and assist agencies throughout the world develop more accurate weather predictions on a local and global scale.

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation, NCAR is a research center focused on furthering the understanding of the Earth's atmosphere and related geospace systems. NCAR scientists will use the SGI system to help forecasters generate more detailed alerts of impending solar-induced geomagnetic storms in the Earth's upper atmosphere. After implementing the Cheyenne supercomputer, NCAR scientists will better understand how particular regions across the globe will be impacted by rising sea levels and changing patterns of storms, precipitation, and temperature. The new supercomputer will also be used to predict climate patterns over the next ten years or further into the future to assess drought risk or the extent of melting sea ice in the Arctic. In addition, NCAR research will lead to improved predictions of severe atmospheric events, such as hour-by-hour risks associated with thunderstorm outbreaks to the timing of the 11-year solar cycle and its potential impacts on GPS and other sensitive technologies. Cheyenne will be a critical tool for researchers across the country studying seismic activity, air quality, wildfires, and other important geoscience topics.

Announcement Highlights

• NCAR selected SGI to build one of the world's most advanced compute systems used to develop models for predicting the impact of climate change and severe weather events on both a global and local scale.
• The SGI system will conduct incredibly complex, data intensive calculations to dramatically improve the resolution and precision of predictions for these events, so governments, industry and local communities can be better prepared for the future.
• Even with its increased power, Cheyenne will be three times more energy efficient (in floating point operations per second, or flops, per watt) than Yellowstone, its predecessor, which is itself highly efficient.

Technical Information SGI HPC systems have delivered ground-breaking research and modeling for the world's most challenging computational issues. The SGI ICE XA supercomputer is uniquely suited to support large system needs in weather and climate simulations. The Cheyenne 5.34 petaflop system can process 5.34 quadrillion calculations per second. The entire system:

• Contains a modular design enabling combinations of processors and accelerators
• Includes more than 7000 future generation Intel® Xeon® processors in high density packaging with SGI E-cell warm water cooled technology for lower power consumption and lower total cost
• Features a high-performance enhanced hypercube interconnect based on Mellanox EDR InfiniBand and 20 Petabytes of High Performance Storage from Data Direct Networks (DDN)
• Incorporates SGI HPC Software including SGI Performance Suite to deliver parallel application performance and SGI Management Suite to enable auto-configurability, power management, health management, and remote system management
• Is capable of more than 2.5 times the amount of scientific computing performed by Yellowstone, the current NCAR supercomputer
• Will be operational in early 2017

The system is highly flexible, configurable and interoperates with existing file systems to handle the vast amounts of data and provides increasingly detailed simulations. For more information, please visit: www.sgi.com/weather .

Supporting Quotes "NCAR requires an increasingly more advanced system. For example, doubling the resolution of a weather system requires a tenfold increase of compute power. This is necessary to help model and pinpoint when and where a storm will hit. To put it simply, we're aiming to process data of very large proportions," said Al Kellie, director of CISL at NCAR. "The SGI system offers scientists an intensive computational environment along with data storage capabilities that will allow them to build more detailed research models and better simulate real-world geoscience problems of today and tomorrow."

"NCAR's new supercomputer, Cheyenne, will be an important tool for researchers across the country to understand climate change, severe weather, air quality and other important atmospheric and geoscience topics," said Jorge Titinger, president and CEO, SGI. "NCAR is constantly pushing the boundaries of research to provide deeper insights. SGI is proud to team with NCAR to help scientists continue to understand our atmosphere and ensure we are prepared for the changing conditions of our planet."

"The societal impact of more accurate weather models is staggering. Advanced forecasts can save lives and greatly reduce the negative economic impact of disaster," said Paul Bloch, president and co-founder, DDN. "DDN is pleased to partner with SGI to deliver NCAR's advanced HPC compute, storage and data lifecycle management solution. By leveraging SGI and DDN technology and expertise optimizing HPC workflows in many of the world's fastest supercomputers, NCAR will deploy the new Cheyenne system quickly and deliver results to scientists in less time."

"We're excited to be working with SGI to deliver the NCAR's Cheyenne supercomputer," said Charlie Wuischpard, vice president, data center group, general manager, workstations and HPC, Intel. "Powered by future generation Intel® Xeon® processors, Cheyenne will enable advances in weather and climate research previously not possible, all while using industry standard programming models and techniques."

"We are happy to collaborate with SGI and NCAR to build a next generation supercomputer at NCAR," said Marc Sultzbaugh, senior vice president at Mellanox Technologies. "Weather and climate simulations require moving and analyzing increasingly large amounts of data. Mellanox InfiniBand solutions accelerate the overall system performance by enabling in-network computing, the ability to analyze data as it moves within the datacenter, which reduces simulation time. The SGI ICE XA scalable systems with Mellanox InfiniBand technology deliver unique overall application performance and the highest supercomputer return on investment."

Suggested Tweets

• NCAR selects @SGI_corp supercomputer to identify effects of rising sea levels and climate change. #HPC #NCAR #climatechange
• NCAR to project climate patterns ten years into future with @SGI_corp supercomputer. #HPC #climatechange #HPCmatters
• NCAR chooses a @SGI_corp supercomputer to help predict drought risks. #HPCmatters #HPC #NCAR #climatechange

About SGI SGI is a global leader in high-performance solutions for compute, data analytics and data management that enable customers to accelerate time to discovery, innovation, and profitability. Visit sgi.com (sgi.com/) for more information.

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© 2016 Silicon Graphics International Corp. All rights reserved. SGI, the SGI logo, and ICE are trademarks or registered trademarks of Silicon Graphics International Corp. or its subsidiaries in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective holders. DDN is a registered trademark of DataDirect Networks, Inc. Intel and Xeon are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation. All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies.