Information Technology Market

Until now, cloud solutions have been primarily focused on running important business applications like CRM, ERP, email and other database programs. SGI has announced the world’s first large-scale, on-demand cloud computing service specifically dedicated to technical High Performance Computing (HPC) applications, codenamed Cyclone. Cyclone initially supports a number of leading applications partners and five technical domains, including computational fluid dynamics, finite element analysis, computational chemistry and materials, computational biology and ontologies.

Cyclone is available in two service models: Software as a Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). With the SaaS model, customers can significantly reduce time to results by accessing and fully exploiting Cyclone’s pre-defined, pre-certified technical applications. The IaaS model allows customers to install and run their own applications.

The SGI technology at Cyclone’s core is comprised of some of the world’s fastest supercomputing hardware architectures, including SGI® Altix® scale-up, Altix® ICE scale-out and Altix® XE hybrid clusters, all based on Intel® Xeon® or Itanium® processors. The hybrid architecture offers either NVIDIA® Tesla GPUs or AMD FireStream™ GPU compute accelerators for floating point double precision workloads, and Tilera accelerators for integer workloads. High performance SGI InfiniteStorage systems are available for scratch space and long-term archival of customer data.

At the system software level, Cyclone offers a flexible computing environment with the choice of Novell® SUSE® or Red Hat® Linux® operating systems, further performance-optimized through the addition of SGI® ProPack™. Altair PBS Professional® and SGI® ISLE™ Cluster Manager provide system scheduling and management.

With Cyclone’s SaaS model, SGI delivers access to leading-edge open source applications and best-of-breed commercial software platforms from top Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). Supported applications include: OpenFOAM, NUMECA, Acusolve, LS-Dyna, Gaussian, Gamess, NAMD, Gromacs, LAMMPS, BLAST, FASTA, HMMER, ClustalW and OntoStudio. SGI expects to add additional domains and applications partners over time.