Today SGI announced that the Earthquake and Volcano Information Center of the Earthquake Research Institute (ERI) at the University of Tokyo, has deployed a large-scale parallel computing solution from SGI for leading-edge seismological and volcanological research. The theoretical peak performance of the solution is six times greater than the previous system.
The SGI solution, which includes SGI UV 2000, a highly advanced shared-memory system and SGI ICE X, the world’s most powerful distributed-memory system, provides a joint-use computing platform for large-scale computing in science and technology, including model calculation and simulation in leading-edge seismological and volcanological studies. Additionally, ERI deployed SGI VizServer with NICE Software for the visualization of graphic-intensive, 3D images to their remote user community.
The Earthquake and Volcano Information Center of the Earthquake Research Institute at the University of Tokyo was established as a core facility to collect, process and distribute seismic observation data among universities. The Institute conducts research activities for scientific understanding of various phenomena related to seismic and volcanic activities within the earth as well as for mitigation of disasters derived from such phenomena. As a result of this SGI large-scale parallel computing solution, ERI achieved dramatic improvements in performance and scale needed to fulfill the wide variety of research demands for preventing and mitigating seismic and volcanic disasters.
ERI is a great example of how important powerful, large-scale computing technology is to process and analyze massive amounts of data,” said Bob Braham, chief marketing officer, SGI. “As a result of the sheer compute capacity available to the researchers at ERI, they are able to conduct more simulations with larger compute needs to ultimately mitigate damage resulting from seismic and volcanic disasters. SGI is pleased to be providing the infrastructure necessary to make this possible.”
The Linux-based, large-scale SGI computing platform can be leveraged to solve a range of complex problems using parallel computing and shared or distributed-memory systems. The SGI UV 2000 symmetric multi-processing system (SMP) provides 1,024-cores using Intel Xeon E5-4600 v2 processors coupled with 8 terabytes (TB) of cache-coherent shared memory. The SGI ICE X distributed-memory system provides a 144-node cluster with 3,456 cores using Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 processors. High speed connection between nodes is delivered using InfiniBand 4x FDR. Additionally, high capacity storage is achieved utilizing a 500TB Lustre File System and the SGI InfiniteStorage 5100 with 288TB for data backup. SGI VizServer with NICE Software is deployed to enable visualization remotely through networks. With the use of the visualization system, each researcher can easily conduct real-time simulations of the computed results, collaborate and share across multiple users.
