64 processor SGI 2800 at Mississippi Center for Supercomputing Research

Mountain View 22 May 00 The Mississippi Center for Supercomputing Research (MCSR) at the University of Mississippi has installed a 64-processor SGI 2800 server. The center's largest single application is the use of software from Gaussian, Inc. of Carnegie, Penn. for molecular modeling studies. MCSR upgraded its eight-processor SGI Origin 2000 system to a 64-processor configuration with 16 GByte of memory, primarily to make Mississippi researchers more competitive nationally in the USA in the solicitation of contracts and grants.

MCSR is a state-funded facility that provides high-performance computing services to research groups at all Mississippi universities. Studies currently running on MCSR's computing facilities include compute-intensive subjects such as molecular bonding, protein modeling, the effects of ocean currents on climate, river flow modeling and spacecraft design.

"The SGI 2800 system is a very important component of our research facilities," said Roach. "It's our most powerful high-performance computer. It's being used extensively in support of research efforts that generate between $15 million and $20 million a year for the state of Mississippi. That allows professors to hire graduate students and conduct research at a very competitive level nationally, which they have to do in order to get funding."

The computing power and highly parallel architecture of the SGI 2800 system at MCSR is attracting potential users on a national basis as well. MCSR is currently assessing the feasibility of running highly parallel computational fluid dynamics applications for NASA in fields such as acoustics.

With up to 1 TByte of shared memory, SGI 2800 is the largest shared-memory ccNUMA server available in the world. Starting at 64 processors, this server provides scalability to 512 processors for high-performance computing applications requiring large numbers of high-performance processors working together, supporting both shared-memory and message-passing programming environments.

"Scalable architecture is the direction of the future for high-performance computing," said Roach. "The SGI ccNUMA architecture is very attractive. It gives us a very user-friendly environment and is more cost-effective than vector platforms. SGI also provides us with a number of excellent tools that make the Origin platform even more efficient. And we've had nothing but good support from SGI through the years."

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