14 DAY TRIAL // SGI's high performance computing solutions seem to have gained quite a bit of ground recently as the company has announced that it just sold yet another HPC system, this time to the Korean Air Force's 73rd Weather Group, that will be used for producing long-term weather forecasts.
The Altix ICE 8400 system that SGI shipped features more than 1,700 processor cores built with Intel Xeon processors 5600 series, and 800 TB of SGI InfiniteStorage and Spectra Logic tape storage.
The computer will be used for numerical weather forecasting and is projected to achieve twice the performance of the previous solution employed by the Korean Air Force's 73rd Weather Group.
The weather forecasting results obtained from this new system will be shared with other meteorological administrations to provide more accurate data for the Korean peninsula.
Intel's Xeon 5600-series processors that stand at the heart of the SGI machine are based on the company's Westmere-EP architecture and feature four or six processing cores and their operating frequency ranges between 1.86GHz and 3.33GHz.
In addition, the CPUs also support Intel's Hyper-Threading technology, than doubles the number of threads available, as well as Turbo Boost and AES-NI support, among others.
“Having previously used a government supercomputing facility, we wanted the fastest available cluster system for weather forecasting,” said the head of the group responsible for weather forecasting for the Korean Air Force.
“This will provide us with faster and more immediate computing power and shorter analysis times, and will enable us to produce longer term forecasts in greater detail.
“Additionally, the project includes not only compute but also monitoring and administration services, plus archiving and security systems, as well as interconnection to outside agencies.”
SGI has already installed the Altix ICE 8400 and the Korean Air Force has begun operating the machine.