SGI (NASDAQ: SGI), the trusted leader in technical computing, announced today that its SGI ICE 8400 high performance compute (HPC) system with AMD Opteron 6200 processors achieved the top performance number for 64-, 32-, 16-, 8-, and 4-socket configurations for the SPECMPIL2007 benchmark. The SPECMPIL benchmark is SPEC's "benchmark suite for evaluating MPI-parallel, floating point, compute intensive performance across a wide range of cluster and SMP hardware," according to the SPEC website.

The SGI ICE 8400 platform with AMD processors is a completely open platform optimized for HPC workloads and runs an off-the-shelf Linux operating system for application compatibility. Although the ICE platform is able to comfortably support multi-petaflop sized installations, design considerations allow cost effective solutions down to a half rack. Single- or dual-plane integrated InfiniBand can be cabled into four different topologies, including hypercube, enhanced hypercube, all to all, and fat-tree, allowing flexible network customization for a variety of workloads."The SGI ICE HPC platform is the speed and scale leader in the industry for scale-out workloads," said Bill Mannel, vice president of product marketing at SGI. "Whether configured with a half rack or hundreds of racks, the platform is built on standard RedHat or SuSE Linux and managed by SGI Management Center, which provides full system management capabilities, along with SGI Performance Suite, with run-time optimizations."

With a full menu of supported ISV applications in the biosciences and manufacturing industries, including SGI's own open source OpenFOAM Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software, SGI ICE with AMD processors is an excellent platform for many structural analysis and CFD workflows. The platform is integrated completely with software, stood-up, and tested in SGI's manufacturing facility in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, before shipment to the customer. With an engineering team close by, any last-minute issues are quickly resolved before the platform arrives at the customer's datacenter. With this attention to quality, SGI ICE achieved a nearly 100% customer satisfaction rating on a poll recently conducted by SGI among current ICE customers.

"SGI ICE platforms exemplify price-performance and manageability - key values for the customer," said Patrick Patla, vice-president, server and commercial business, AMD. "Customers will be amazed at the speed at which this new SGI offering will allow them to run their code."

Availability
SGI recently upgraded its SGI ICE 8400 to Opteron 6200 processors, and has been shipping configurations starting at $150,000 since November 2011. The company has a 2048-core ICE 8400 system with AMD 6282SE processors available for quantifying the performance of key applications. Potential customers are welcome to learn more about running their own performance benchmarks.