World's third most powerful computer on the planet has been switched on recently in New Mexico, 48 hours after its delivery. Bill Richardson, New Mexico governor, took part in the ceremony and saluted the arrival of the multicore monster.

You might be surprised to find out that the New Mexico supercomputer is not another creation of IBM, HP or Sun, but it is a 14,336-core SGI Altix ICE system from SGI. Beyond its impressive computing power, the system is extremely easy to deploy. While other supercomputers take weeks to assemble and get online, the SGI system could be switched on in just two days.

"We wanted a production system -- one that could be used to run applications soon after its arrival -- and that's exactly what we got with SGI Altix ICE," said William Feiereisen, a science advisor to Governor Richardson. "This system arrived on pallets on Thursday and was running to the log-in prompt by Saturday. It's gratifying to be working with a solution provider like SGI, which has successfully delivered a true production-ready supercomputer."

The SGI Altix ICE is powered by Intel Xeon quad-core processors, features 28TB of RAM and comes with 172TB of SGI storage. It is housed at the Intel facility in Rio Rancho and will be used mainly for educational and research purposes.

"New Mexico is serious about developing its high-tech economy," Governor Bill Richardson said. "We're getting more and more interest from companies and institutions that want to be part of this project as news of this powerful machine spreads."

The supercomputer will use an advanced data management solution that will facilitate data access and storage. The SGI InfiniteStorage is built on the Lustre networked cluster filesystem, a storage array technology produced by LSI.

The SGI Altix ICE can perform 172 trillion operations per second. It was announced on 2nd of November 2006 and it claims the third place in the top500 list of supercomputers, immediately after the Livermore Labs' BlueGene/L and the JUGENE - Blue Gene/P in Germany.