SILN GRAP : UK Atomic Weapons Establishment Accelerates Engineering Efforts with SGI® Altix® UV
03/30/2011| 04:20pm US/Eastern
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SGI
(NASDAQ:SGI), a trusted leader in technical computing, today announced
that the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) in the United Kingdom has
selected two SGI®
Altix® UV 1000 systems to rapidly solve large memory engineering
problems.
AWE is responsible for manufacturing and maintaining the warheads for
the UK's nuclear deterrent, Trident. The organization's work covers the
entire life cycle of nuclear warheads, from initial concept, assessment
and design through component manufacture and assembly, in-service
support, decommissioning and then disposal.
"The breadth and depth of our science, engineering and technology is
extensive, and includes several key areas that are central to AWE's
work, such as plasma physics, design physics and supercomputing," said
Ken Atkinson, HPC Strategy and Procurement manager at AWE. "We require
the most advanced high performance computing to support our demanding,
large memory applications, and looked to SGI to provide a system on
which we can rely. We can now run our largest problem sets in less than
half the time it previously took, bringing the total cost of ownership
over the next three years to less than 50 percent of the current level."
AWE's sophisticated scientific and technological capabilities enable the
design and production of nuclear warheads that are performance-assured
and meet stringent safeguards. For example, maintenance of Trident must
be performed without actual nuclear testing, as the UK's ratification of
the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty prohibits any test that
produces any nuclear yield underground, underwater, in the atmosphere or
in space. AWE must therefore continually develop methods to verify the
safety and reliability of nuclear warheads through a science-based
program.
"It's hard to think of more critical applications than those supported
by the SGI equipment deployed at AWE," said Rod Evans, vice president of
SGI EMEA. "With Altix UV 1000, AWE can really accelerate its
computer-based research, dramatically reducing 'time to science.'"
Designed for maximum scalability, the Altix UV 1000 is a fully
integrated cabinet-level solution, with up to 256 sockets (2,048 cores)
and 16 TBs of shared memory in four racks, delivering up to 18.5
teraflops of compute power in a single system image.
"Managing the world's atomic weapons stockpile is an extremely important
global issue," said Rajeeb Hazra, general manager of High Performance
Computing at Intel. "We are excited that Intel and SGI can support
simulating such advanced scenarios with Altix UV powered by Intel® Xeon®
processors 7500 series."
The SGI Altix UV 1000 systems will run in addition to two existing SGI
solutions - an SGI® Altix XE500-based cluster used for virtualization
and an SGI Altix 4700 blade-based supercomputer.
For more information on AWE, please visit www.awe.co.uk.
About SGI
SGI, a trusted leader in technical computing, is focused on helping
customers solve their most demanding business and technology challenges.
Visit www.sgi.com
for more information.
©2011 SGI. SGI and Altix are registered trademarks or 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.
Schwartz Communications, Inc.
Sam Hallock, 415-512-0770
SGIPR@schwartz-pr.com
or
Johnson
King
Jonathan Mathias, 020 7401 7968
Hannah Townsend, 020 7401
7968
SGIPR@johnsonking.co.uk
© Business Wire 2011
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