Silicon Graphics International (SGI) has unveiled its latest supercomputer – the ICE XA.

The new machine is built around Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 (Haswell) processors, and averages 191 pure compute teraFLOPS per rack.

SGI has also launched UV 300 and UV 30EX in-memory supercomputers, a new version of SGI Management Center and a redesigned support service.

The company says these products take it a step closer towards creating true exascale systems by 2020. The term ‘exascale’ refers to systems capable of at least one exaFLOPS – that’s a thousand petaFLOPS, or a quintillion floating point operations per second.

“Exascale is the next frontier in high performance computing and will enable computational breakthroughs spanning climatology, energy, security and the speed of human thought,” said Jorge Titinger, president and CEO of SGI.

“While these systems will be designed for the most extreme HPC environments, our progression will bring practical solutions to tera- and petascale problems seen today.”

The announcements were timed to coincide with the SC14 show in New Orleans – the biggest event on any supercomputing enthusiast’s calendar.

The next frontier
ICE XA is SGI’s sixth generation distributed-memory supercomputer. It can scale out to tens of thousands of nodes, each featuring up to four 2-socket CPUs and up to 512GB of DDR4 memory.

The nodes are based on the latest Xeon silicon, which is also used in Cray’s recently announced machine, the XC40.

ICE XA ships with second generation E-cell warm water cooling technology, which seals two compute racks along with a cooling rack in a closed loop ‘cell’. According to SGI, this approach provides at least a 30 percent increase in cooling efficiency compared to traditional methods.

Meanwhile the UV300 and UV30EX extend SGI’s in-memory computing product range. They are based on Intel Xeon E7-8800 v2 chips, with Xeon Phi coprocessors and Nvidia GPUs available as an option. These HPC servers were designed for complex analytics, visualization and real-time data processing applications.

UV300 can deliver up to 480 physical cores and 24TB of coherent shared memory in a single box. UV30EX is a smaller, 4-socket version of the same appliance, providing up to 3TB of in-memory computing power, which can be upgraded to the full UV300 if the organization’s needs change.

The SGI Management Center 3.0 simplifies hardware management with fast automatic provisioning across clusters, node-level power controls and improved event logs. The company has also launched Remote Services, which help maximize uptime by monitoring the infrastructure around-the-clock and enabling predictive maintenance.

SGI says it will continue working towards exascale computing by bringing storage ever closer to compute, while simultaneously experimenting with immersion cooling to reduce costs.

All of the new software packages are available immediately. SGI UV 300 and SGI UV 30EX will begin shipping before the end of the year. ICE XA is available for pre-orders, but will only begin shipping in spring 2015.