Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center Selects SGI to Power the Next Generation of Scientific Research

SGI (NASDAQ:SGI), the trusted leader in technical computing, today announced that the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC) headquartered in Poznan, Poland and affiliated with the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry at the Polish Academy of Sciences, has purchased an SGI high performance computing (HPC) solution. In total, the system purchased will deliver 224 peak teraflops of performance and will enable advanced academic and scientific research throughout Poland.

The system chosen consists of an SGI^® Rackable™ C1103-G15 cluster utilizing AMD Opteron^® 6200 series processors, and includes 120 servers each with one NVIDIA^® M2050 GPU per node and another 107 servers with two M2050 GPUs per server. The full configuration will feature 12.6 TB of memory, 5448 CPU cores and 149632 GPU CUDA cores, and is intended to satisfy the increasing performance requirements of Poznan Supercomputing Center users.

"We decided to go for the combination of the most modern CPU technology together with proven GPU technology,” said Norbert Meyer, director of the Supercomputing facility at Poznan. "Such a combination allows us to ensure optimal parameters for our users. This system, which was financed from structural funds coming from POWIEW and PL-GRID national projects and will be also used in the PRACE (EU project), allowed us to reach 63 teraflops, enough for a place on the TOP500 list today, with less than half of nodes installed for the test. The full configuration will feature more than twice as many more nodes than the measured system, which ensures enough performance for our users as well as a good position on June 2012 TOP500 list.”

PSNC has been the leader in implementing innovative technologies for the national scientific network during the last 20 years, and is at present in the network PIONIER – Polish Optical Internet. The HPC center within PSNC provides computing power, disk space and archiving systems for science, business and public institutions, and appears already several times on the TOP500 list of the most powerful computing systems in the world. The computing capacity includes systems with distributed and shared memory of various architectures including parallel vector, multi-processor SMPs (including the SGI^® UV 1000 with 2048 cores and 16TB of shared memory) and clusters, connected via fast local networks including InfiniBand, Gigabit Ethernet and Fast Ethernet.

"The practice of combining of CPUs and GPUs to optimize price and performance continues to grow,” said Bill Mannel, vice president of product marketing at SGI. "Allowing our customers to choose specific configurations reinforces our commitment to providing the most flexible product offerings to meet their data-intensive, technical computing workload challenges.”

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