ScaleMP’s vSMP Foundation Technology Chosen for Gordon

ScaleMP, provider of virtualization solutions for high-end computing, announced that the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego will use ScaleMP vSMP Foundation technology to create its next-generation high-performance computer, named Gordon.

The new supercomputer is made possible by a five-year, $20 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and will be dedicated to solving critical science and societal problems.

“The new SDSC supercomputer enables researchers to address issues in a wide range of academic fields, including biotechnology, geology, meteorology and many others which require modeling, simulation and other compute intensive applications,” said SDSC Interim Director Michael Norman, who is also the project’s principal investigator. “Gordon will be a major player for the research community and its high-performance computing (HPC) needs.”

Gordon is scheduled to be installed in mid-2011, and will become a part of a network of next-generation HPC systems being made available to the research community through an open-access national grid. The supercomputer will feature 245 teraflops of total compute power, 64 terabytes (TB) of DRAM (digital random access memory), 256 TB of flash memory, and four petabytes of disk storage.

A key feature of Gordon will be 32 ‘supernodes’ based on new Intel processors available in 2011, and combining several state-of-the-art technological innovations through innovative virtualization for aggregation software provided by ScaleMP. Each supernode consists of 32 compute nodes, capable of 240 gigaflops/node and 64 gigabytes (GB) of DRAM. A supernode also incorporates 2 I/O nodes, each with 4 TB of flash memory. When tied together by ScaleMP’s vSMP Foundation technology, each of the system’s 32 supernodes has the potential of 7.7 TF of compute power and 10 TB of memory (2 TB of DRAM and 8 TB of flash memory). Once fully installed and configured, Gordon is expected to rate among the top 30 supercomputers in the world.

“ScaleMP is excited to be part of this ground-breaking supercomputing project,” said Shai Fultheim, founder and president of ScaleMP. “The SDSC is dedicated to accelerating scientific inquiry and discovery and we’re pleased to be able to contribute to such a significant project and to help make possible Gordon’s HPC capabilities.”

About vSMP Foundation
SMP Foundation aggregates multiple industry-standard off-the-shelf x86 servers into one single virtual high-end system for the high-performance computing (HPC) market. vSMP Foundation provides customers with an alternative to traditional expensive symmetrical multiprocessor (SMP) systems and also offers simplified clustering infrastructure with a single operating system. It supports aggregation of up to 16 servers into a single virtual SMP system, providing customers with:

• Up to 4 TB of shared memory for large memory requirements
• Up to 128 cores virtual SMP, proven scalability and record-breaking memory bandwidth
• Ease of use and lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) for applications, with simplified cluster management and storage architecture
• Improved utilization through a centralized and consolidated architecture