Photo Release -- SGI Announces Full Support for the Intel(R) Xeon Phi(TM) Coprocessor Across All Server Lines (AcT)

Early Customers Pushing the Edge in Scientific Applications

SALT LAKE CITY, Nov. 12, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- SGI (Nasdaq:SGI), the trusted leader in technical computing, today announced support of the Intel® Xeon® Phi™ coprocessor in fully managed and integrated solutions across its entire server product line. By combining the power of Intel® Xeon® Phi™, which offers over one Teraflop double-precision performance per coprocessor¹, with SGI's leading server platforms, customers can now take advantage of dramatic performance improvements for parallel workloads in an x86 programming model. SGI has been an Intel® Xeon® Phi™ Validation Partner with early adoption of the Intel® Xeon® Phi™ coprocessor on SGI® server platforms at NASA Ames, COSMOS Consortium² and The Genome Analysis Centre (TGAC), who are driving important advancements in scientific simulations and genomics.

A photo accompanying this release is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/newsroom/prs/?pkgid=15710

Professor Stephen Hawking said: "I am delighted that our new COSMOS supercomputer from SGI contains the latest many-core technology from Intel®, the Xeon® Phi™ coprocessors. With our powerful and flexible SGI UV 2000 we can continue to focus on discovery, leading worldwide efforts to advance the understanding of our Universe."

"Intel® Xeon® Phi™ running in SGI® UV™ 2000 gives us the computing capability to run extremely complex models with a high degree of parallelism while keeping it simple so that we can fix our attention on the cosmological data rather than technology," says Professor Paul Shellard, COSMOS Director. "The combination of scale, parallelism, massive memory and ease of use is why we chose SGI UV with Intel® Xeon® Phi™."

Intel® Xeon® Phi™ is offered on the following platforms:

• SGI® UV™ 2000, the "Big Brain Computer," with up to 4096 cores and 64TB of cache coherent main memory in a single-image system representing the most scalable and easy to manage Intel Xeon Phi system available on the market today.
• SGI® UV™ 20, the power packed small sibling of the SGI UV 2000, ideal for development or remote office solutions, with nearly 2.5 Teraflops of compute, 1.5 TB of memory, 4 PCIe gen 3 slots and two internal I/O modules, all in a 2U package with four Intel® Xeon® E5-4600 processors.
• SGI® Rackable™ twin-socket Intel® Xeon® servers tailored to meet your exact specifications for high-density, high I/O or high memory.
• SGI® ICE™ X, the latest edition of SGI's award-winning high performance computing scale-out blade server.

Integrated and tested completely in SGI's manufacturing facility, all solutions are available with SGI Management Center and Performance Suite software as well as SGI InfiniteStorage™ to ensure immediate productivity for customers.

"The SGI UV 2000 is a cache-coherent shared memory system just like your workstation, except that it scales well beyond the industry scale-up limit of eight sockets and Terabytes of memory. Now, when the sockets can be paired with Intel® Xeon® Phi™ coprocessors, the combination provides in-memory computing at an extreme scale," said Dr. Eng Lim Goh, CTO, SGI. "Customers such as The Genome Analysis Centre and COSMOS can accelerate finding answers to the most data-intensive challenges on a platform which can run many of the software tools that scientists, developers and analysts are familiar with on their Linux workstations or desktops."

For scale-out, scale-up and hybrid deployments, SGI provides everything needed for a complete Intel® Xeon® Phi™ coprocessor solution including factory-integrated hardware and software, "starter kits," worldwide support and services, complemented by the subject matter know-how of fifty experts across many application disciplines and fields of science. With SGI Management Center Premium Edition, the Intel® Xeon® Phi™ coprocessor can be monitored and managed using an interactive Graphical User Interface (GUI) that also manages all the other system components.

"The most demanding customers in supercomputing like COSMOS and TGAC require innovation, performance and programmability. SGI's supercomputing solutions now meet these requirements with the inclusion of Intel® Xeon® Phi™ products", stated Dr. Rajeeb Hazra, IAG Vice President and General Manager Technical Computing Group, Intel. "SGI's solutions with Intel® Xeon® Phi™ products will provide leading customers advancements in performance, scale and ease of use in the many-core era with one proven programming paradigm."

Availability

The Intel® Xeon® Phi™ is available for order on the aforementioned SGI systems now. General Availability is January 28th 2013.

About SGI

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Contact Information:

Ogilvy Public Relations
Meghan Fintland
415-677-2704
SGImedia@ogilvy.com

© 2012 Silicon Graphics International Corp. SGI, Rackable, ICE, UV, InfiniteStorage and the SGI logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Silicon Graphics International Corp. or its subsidiaries in the United States and/or other countries. Intel, Xeon and Phi are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation. All other trademarks are property of their respective holders.

¹ Based on calculated theoretical peak double precision performance capability for a single coprocessor. 16 DP FLOPS/clock/core * 60 cores * 1.053GHz = 1.0108 TeraFlop/s.

² The COSMOS consortium, headed by Professor Hawking, is part of the UK DiRAC HPC facility, funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council and Department of Business, Innovation and Skills. Please direct enquiries to Andrey Kaliazin, COSMOS system manager, or Professor Paul Shellard, Director.