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"What SGI have done with ICE is bring the interconnect and switching into the system, which allows them to scale much more effectively than other vendors out there today," said Richard Dracott, general manager for the high performance computing division at Intel.
"Certainly the ICE system's architecture that they have developed has the ability to scale much more cost effectively and higher up than a traditional cluster based on Infiniband," Dracott added.
The initial system will consist of 40 racks, each with 128 Xeon 5472 processors running at 3.0 GHz, plus seven support racks. The system will run SGI's Linux implementation, which carries a lot of the enterprise technology from the old IRIX days.
The initial deployment will be a 245 teraflop system and gradually expanded to 1 petaflop by next year. Dracott said that the first systems will be the Xeons but there is the possibility of a change to an other Intel platform. "The next round of deployments could use Nehalem, but NASA hasn't said what they are using," he said.
Pleiades will be used for a variety of scientific calculations, ranging from climate modeling to shuttle simulations to nanotube simulations. "These machines are going to be able to take that kind of science and research out to a couple generations of improvement," said Thigpen. He said the Pleiades system will allow for at least a 2.5-fold increase in work capacity, and perhaps more in some jobs.
NASA is upgrading its facility to handle Pleiades greater power requirements, but the first pieces will arrive this month. Thigpen expects to start putting it to work in June and be in full production by August.
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