AN INDEPENDENT PUBLICATION NOT AFFILIATED WITH SC

Mo n d a y, N o ve m b e r 1 8 , 2 0 1 3

O se r C o m m u n ic a tio n s G ro u p

SGI PROVIDES EXPERTISE

FOR BIG DATA

D e n ve r

COGNIMEM BUILDS CHIPS

THAT ARE TAUGHT,
NOT PROGRAMMED

An interview with Jorge Titinger, CEO, SGI.

SCSD: Tell our readers about your company. Whats your main line of
business?

An interview with Bruce McCormick, CEO, Cognimem

Technologies Inc.
SCSD: What does Cognimem do?

JT: SGI is a global leader in high-performance computing (HPC). We

are focused on helping customers solve their most demanding business
and technology challenges by delivering technical computing, Big Data
analytics, cloud computing and peta-scale storage solutions that accelerate time to discovery, innovation and profitability. Financially strong and building on 25 years of
innovation with more than 625 granted and pending patents, SGI has more than 1,300
employees worldwide, serves more than 6,500 customers and is distributed in 50 countries.
SCSD: What was the most significant event or series of events affecting your

BM: Cognimem stands for cognitive memory, and what we do is build general purpose artificial intelligence hardware. It is different than traditional computing in that it
operates purely in parallel, and it is taught versus programmed.
Traditional computing, like what is in your smartphone or personal computer, has
reached its limits in going faster in a serial fashion. You probably have noticed that no
one talks about faster CPUs anymore, and when you try to put many of these processors together it is very difficult to program.
What we build is practical and commercially available hardware that is patterned after how we biologically process information. That is, massively parallel
pattern recognition. We do not have physically separate processor and memory

Continued on Page 17

Continued on Page 12

ADAPTIVE COMPUTING
ANNOUNCES NEW PRODUCT

SILICON MECHANICS LAUNCHES

THIRD ANNUAL RESEARCH
GRANT PROGRAM

An interview with Eva Cherry, President and CEO of Silicon

Mechanics, Inc.

SCSD: Tell our readers about your company. What is your main line of
business?

EC: Silicon Mechanics, Inc. is an industry-leading provider of

rackmount server, storage and high-performance computing solutions. Using the latest innovations in hardware and software technology, we
work in collaboration with our customers to design and build the most efficient,
cost-effective technology solution for their needs. Silicon Mechanics has been
recognized as one of the fastest growing companies in the Greater Seattle
Technology Corridor.
SCSD: What type of clients do you serve?

Continued on Page 12

An interview with Rob Clyde, CEO, Adaptive Computing.

SCSD: What are the challenges your customers face today?

RC: Todays enterprise needs to rely on collected data and

simulation results to stay competitive in the marketplace. No longer
can CEOs make business decisions based on hunches and what
they can physically extract from industry research. Businesses are
turning to their CIOs and data scientists to leverage big data to help predict
likely outcomes and make data-driven decisions. Unfortunately, the increase
in compute and data intensive workflows creates a logjam within the
data center.

SCSD: Does Adaptive help alleviate the logjam and solve these big
data challenges?
Continued on Page 17

Mo n d a y, N o ve m b e r 1 8 , 2 0 1 3

CLUSTERED SYSTEMS INTRODUCES

SUPER-NODE PLATFORM
Application-specific compute clusters
have been around for a long time as ad
hoc assemblies of equipment to meet
diverse compute, storage and networking
needs. A cohesive specification and
deployment approach encompassing
hardware, software and networking has
been absent. Clustered Systems and
Infiscale have cooperatively developed
Super Nodes to address these issues.
A Super Node comprises an intelligently managed cluster. It can be stand
alone, or more commonly, an element of
a much larger compute system. It is

instantiated within an integrated power,

cooling and networking infrastructure in
which any compute and storage module
can be deployed. Super Nodes are readily optimized for specific workloads and
general purpose shared computing environments by adding blades comprising
multi-core, multiple CPU servers, manycore accelerators, high-density microservers, large RAM footprint servers,
multi-terabyte disk storage units, SSD
acceleration/cache units, and networking
switches and interfaces.
Infiscale's Software Defined Scalable

ABERDEEN FINDS BALANCE

FOR SSD DATA STORAGE
By Niso Levitas, Research and
Development Manager, Aberdeen LLC

It is getting harder to pick the right SSD

storage these days. It is possible to buy a
shared storage completely made of PCIE Memory cards at the cutting edge. You
can buy a solution completely made of
enterprise level SSD drives, or you can
go for a hybrid, with a couple of SSDs for
caching and good old mechanical hard
drives for the rest. This line-up starts
from extremely expensive and goes
down to cheap.

The key is to target your performance, capacity and your budget. In our
labs, we explored all the options for
affordable shared SSD storage that does
not break the bank. The test results, comparing only mechanical with hybrid SSD
solutions, were disappointing. All of the
buzz about hybrid RAID controllers went
down the drain.
We started testing all SSD drive
arrays. We tested a set of 16 drives with
good endurance for shared storage. It
started around 500K IOPS and after an
hour of data bombarding, the perform-

Su p e r C o m p u te r Sh o w D a ily
Infrastructure (SDSI)
knits the whole thing
together with Super
Node
Manager
(SNM), easy-to-use
configuration, optimization, and I/O
of
all
control
deployed
Super
Nodes; PERCEUS,
whole infrastructure
OS and application
stack provisioning; Abstractual, intelligent
system management and workload scheduling; GravityFS, distributed, parallel file
system; and GravityPark Open Parallel
Toolkit, advanced, next-generation
Continued on Page 17

ance declined and

leveled off at
100K IOPS. The
choice of drives
was not good. We
needed to find the
right drives to
keep the performance high, and the
life of the drives should be suitable for
shared enterprise use.
After testing numerous sets of drives,
we hit 320K IOPS and once the results
stayed there for a day, we were happy.
This is the sweet spot for 4K Random
Reads, sustained. It is the perfect performance for applications up to 14-15TB on an
Continued on Page 17

AN INDEPENDENT PUBLICATION
NOT AFFILIATED WITH SC
Lee M. Oser
CEO and Editor-in-Chief
Lyle Sapp
Senior Associate Publisher
Director of Sales
Kim Forrester
Jeff Rosano
Associate Publishers
Lorrie Baumann
Editorial Director
Hayden Neeley
Senior Associate Editor
Jeanie Catron
Associate Editor
Yasmine Brown
Keaton Kohl
Graphic Designers
Ruth Haltiwanger
Customer Service Managers
Lynn Hilton
Jeff Meyer
Account Managers
Enrico Cecchi
European Sales
Super Computer Show Daily is published by
Oser Communications Group 2013.
All rights reserved.
Executive and editorial offices at:
1877 N. Kolb Road, Tucson, AZ 85715
520.721.1300/Fax: 520.721.6300
www.oser.com
European offices located at Lungarno Benvenuto
Cellini, 11, 50125 Florence, Italy.

Mo n d a y, N o ve m b e r 1 8 , 2 0 1 3

ONE STOP SYSTEMS DELIVERS

HIGH-DENSITY 8 MILLION IOPS
FLASH STORAGE ARRAY
One Stop Systems, Inc. (OSS) unveils
its Fusion-Powered Flash Storage Array
(FSA) product line to customers
demanding extreme storage performance in a small footprint. The FSA is the
ideal platform for high-speed data
recording and processing, lightning fast
data response time, high-availability and
flexibility. The latest FSA rendition
offers enterprise, financial and intelligence, surveillance as well as reconnaissance (ISR) applications for the fastest,
most flexible and powerful turnkey storage solution to date.
Fusion-io ioScale flash coupled
with four 128Gbps OSS PCIe 3.0 server links in the FSA provide the extreme
performance demanded by todays
applications. Uniting these innovations

creates a 100TB network attached flash

array that can reach 40GB/s and more
than 8 million IOPS.
The FSA fits in most datacenters
with its compact size and light-weight. At
a height of 3U and 24" deep, the 19" rack
mount FSA packs up to 32 Fusion
ioScale modules into four individually
removable sleds. The sleds and enclosure
are made of lightweight, rugged alloys
with redundant power and filtered air
cooling optimized to the installation
environment. The local IPMI module
optimizes the enclosure parameters while
also allowing the power user to set features through SNMP or the built-in user
interface based on the overall policy of
the installation. The small footprint,
removable sleds and light weight allows

CIENA DEMONSTRATES
PROTOTYPE AT SC13
At Supercomputing, Ciena will demonstrate a prototype of an open, modular
multi-layer Software Defined Network
(SDN) controller and autonomic intelligence applications for use on carrier
grade wide area networks (WANs). The
SDN will connect to the industrys first
live, fully functional international
research testbed that unites all of the key
packet, optical and software building
blocks required to demonstrate and prove
the benefits of software-defined, multilayer service provider WANs.
The testbed was created in collaboration with Cienas research and education (R&E) partners CANARIE,
Internet2, StarLight and ESnet. It
spans more than 2500km and connects
Ciena labs in Ottawa, Canada and
Hanover, Md. with the R&E community via StarLight in Chicago. An impor-

tant component of Cienas OPn architecture, SDN supports open, application-driven and analytics-enhanced
control of wide area networks, laying
the groundwork for more efficient
capacity utilization and new advanced
research applications.
The testbed leverages OpenFlow
across both the packet and transport
layers, is supported by an open architecture carrier-scale SDN controller
and intrinsic multi-layer operation, and
incorporates real-time analytics software applications.
The SDN controller incorporates a
multi-layer path computation element
and leverages OpenFlow v1.3 with
transport extensions across packet,
OTN and photonic layers for end-toend flow/connection control of the following network elements: a prototype 4

NUMASCALE PROVIDES
PLUG-AND-PLAY SMP, SHARED
MEMORY AT A CLUSTER PRICE
By Trond Smestad, CEO, Numascale

Innovative developers can now access

the power of shared memory systems for
the price point and ease-of-use of a cluster
by
utilizing
Numascales
NumaConnect, a simple add-on card for
commodity servers. The hardware is now
deployed in systems with more than
1,700 cores, and the memory addressing
capability is virtually unlimited.
The big differentiator with
NumaConnect, compared to other
high-speed interconnect technologies,
is its shared memory and cache
coherency. These features allow programs to access any memory location
and any memory mapped I/O device in
a multiprocessor system with a high
degree of efficiency. They provide
scalable systems with a unified pro-

gramming model that stays the same

from the small multi-core machines
used in laptops and desktops to the
largest imaginable single systemimage machines that may contain thousands of processors. The architecture is
commonly classified as ccNuma (or
Numa) but the interconnect system can
alternatively be used as a low latency
clustering interconnect.
Numascale systems are deployed
by simply installing a card with a PCI
form factor into a standard server. This
approach makes it possible to take
advantage of the great price break
offered by mass-produced servers with
volume applications outside the segment covered by NumaConnect.
Servers from IBM, Supermicro and
Dell provide excellent building blocks
for large memory systems in combina-

Su p e r C o m p u te r Sh o w D a ily
one-person installation in data centers,
airborne ISR platforms, mobile shelters
and portable transit cases. The 3U x 18"
x 3.4" sleds fit easily into the enclosure to
protect your investment and your data in
highly secure environments.
The FSA supports OSS PCIe direct
attached storage as well as Fiber Channel
SAN or Infiniband NAS storage options
via the Fusion-io ION Data Accelerator
software. In direct attached mode, an
internal switch matrix allows from one to
four servers to have direct access to the
Fusion ioScale memory in multiple configurations. The sleds act in concert or
separately to fit the changing needs of
any storage application while supporting
any RAID level available to the servers.
In network attached mode, the ION Data
Accelerator software provides a fiber
channel or Infiniband path across servers,
virtual machines and more concurrent
users than the direct attached mode. Up
to 100TB of shared ioMemory becomes
available with industry leading performance, minimum latency and comprehen-

Tb/s packet switch, Cienas 6500

Packet Optical Platform supporting
packet, OTN and photonic switching,
and Cienas 5410 Reconfigurable
Switching System supporting OTN
switching. It also supports a northbound RESTful API that supports
Ciena-developed autonomic operations
intelligence applications that include a
multi-layer optimizer and a dynamic
pricing engine.
The multi-layer optimizer application will show how operators can combine a global view of the current network
state, an analytics-enabled prediction of
future network state based on historical
data, and a global view of all current
service demands to calculate how to reallocate network capacity and regroom
existing services to minimize capital
expenditures, latency, blocking probablility and other metrics.
Based on a historical and current
global view of all the network
resources and service demands, the
analytics-based dynamic pricing engine
tion with NumaConnect cards.
The design is implemented in a chip,
the NumaChip, with an external cache in
DRAM, the NumaCache. The NumaChip
can address up to 4,095 nodes in a single
image system, and each node can have
multiple processor cores. AMD processors can address 256 terabytes of data,
and this does limit the total memory
space of the systems. A directory-based
cache coherence protocol handles scaling, with significant numbers of nodes
sharing data to avoid overloading the
interconnect between nodes with
coherency traffic, which would seriously
reduce real data throughput.
Basic ring topology with distributed switching allows for a number of
different interconnect configurations
that are more scalable than those provided by most other interconnect
switch fabrics. Ring topology also
eliminates the need for a centralized
switch and includes inherent redundancy for multidimensional topologies.
The topologies used are two- and threedimensional topologies (torus) that
have the advantage of built-in redun-

sive visibility.
The FSA achieves end-to-end high
availability at every level in the system.
At the ioMemory level, Fusion-io
Adaptive Flashback software increases
flash reliability and endurance by
rebuilding data at the individual NAND
banks. At the module level, the Fusion
ioScale flash memory offers the reliability proven in the worlds largest datacenters. At the chassis level, the OSS switch
matrix, removable sleds and IPMI module allow for environmental monitoring,
physical rerouting of storage traffic and
hot-swap of the ioScale memory platform. At the array level, the Fusion-io
ION Data Accelerator software provides
replication clustering and SNMP realtime performance and physical array
monitoring.

During SC13, visit One Stop

Systems at booth 1137. For more information, visit www.onestopsystems.com,
760-745-9883
or
email
call
rruple@onestopsystems.com.

application will show how operators

can use pricing to simultaneously maximize revenue and minimize idle
resources. It does this by presenting a
higher price when network resource
supply is projected to be scarce and/or
new demands are expected to be high,
and presenting a lower price when the
opposite is projected. The customer
then selects whichever price and
parameter combination provides them
the most value. Over time, the engine
learns the price points that will incent
the optimal aggregate behavior.
Collectively, these demonstrations
will show the value of creating and
maintaining a fully open, multi-layer
SDN-powered WAN in todays operator
networks, in both the network and the
back office.

During SC13, visit Ciena at booth 1924.

For more information, go to
www.ciena.com, call 800-207-3714 or
+44 20 7012 5555 or email
pr@ciena.com.
dancy, as opposed to systems based on
centralized switches where the switch
represents a single point of failure.
Distributed switching reduces the
cost of the system because there is no
extra switch hardware to pay for. It also
reduces the amount of rack space
required to hold the system, as well as the
power consumption and heat dissipation
from the switch hardware and the associated energy loss of the power supply.
Shared memory and OS simplify
parallelization tasks. Running a singleimage standard OS is an advantage for
reliability, operations and system management. The hardware integrates seamlessly with the processor cache system
and takes advantage of standard optimization techniques.
NumaConnect provides an affordable solution by delivering all the advantages of expensive shared memory computing for a cluster price point.
Visit Numascale during SC13 at booth
2505. For more information, go to
www.numascale.com, call 832-470-8200
or email ts@numascale.com.

12

Mo n d a y, N o ve m b e r 1 8 , 2 0 1 3

VISUALIZE AT EXASCALE
WITH KITWARE
Advances in high-performance computing and data acquisition technologies are
allowing researchers to contemplate
more complex problems than ever before
in many scientific, engineering and medical fields. The research community is
facing the challenge of how to manage,
analyze and visualize data of such
unprecedented size in a meaningful way.
With expertise in high-performance, distributed visualization and data processing, Kitware is addressing these issues.
As a leader in scientific visualization, Kitware is developing the next-generation infrastructure that will power
visualization
at
the
exascale.
Visualization and analysis are critical to
understanding complex data, but current

approaches require a paradigm shift in

order to scale with advances in high-performance computing. To tackle this challenge, Kitware is further developing the
Visualization Toolkit (VTK) and
ParaView, the leading open-source tools
for scientific visualization and analysis.
VTK is the industry standard, an
open-source, freely available software
system for 3D visualization and data processing. A true cross-platform solution
designed to scale from mobile devices up
to supercomputers, VTK supports scientific visualization, information visualization and medical image processing.
ParaView is an open-source application that leverages the robust visualization algorithms of VTK to provide data

ASROCK INC. PRESENTS

ASROCK RACK
ASRock Inc. was established in 2002,
specializing in the field of motherboards.
ASRock strives to build up its own
brand. With 3C design concepts (creativity, consideration and cost-effectiveness),
the company explores the limits of motherboards manufacturing while paying
attention to environmental issues at the
same time, developing products with the
consideration of being eco-friendly.
ASRock has been growing fast, and
has become one of the three largest motherboard brands, with headquarters in
Taipei and Taiwan as well as branches in
Cognimem (Contd. from p. 1)

programmed with instructions. Rather,

our memory is merged together with
processing and is taught. Like us, this
hardware chip technology is massively
parallel, operates at low wattage and
can scale to provide very efficient performance per watt.

SCSD: You talk about creating chips that

can be taught versus being programmed. What does this mean?

BM: You teach the chips much in the

same way you teach a young student how
to read, speak or recognize one object
versus another. Once taught, you can
Silicon Mechanics (Contd. from p. 1)

EC: We have a broad range of academic and research, government and

public sector, and business and industry clients. Our impressive client list
includes
Duke
University,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Lawrence
Livermore
National
Laboratories and the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration.

SCSD: What will you be showcasing at

SC13?

EC: We have a really full program here

at SC13. Well be launching our 3rd
Annual Research Grant Program,
exhibiting the research successes

Europe and the U.S. Since 2012, the

manufacturer has been positioned as a
leader in this segment in Korea. Its also
the second largest ASRock motherboard
manufacturer in Japan.
The young and vibrant company targets the mainstream segment of the
motherboard business, earning a reputation around the world market with its
reliability and proficiency. In 2013,
ASRock is throwing its enthusiasm into
server product lines, and within six
months the ASRock team will be offering
the following creative server mother-

replicate it for many users.

For instance, if you wanted the chip
to recognize my face versus yours, you
present several examples of your face
and mine to the inputs of the device. As
you show it examples, it will store these
as models and will automatically learn
what is unique that differentiates you versus me.
When it is given an example it hasnt
seen before, it compares it to all the patterns it learned in parallel and gives a
decision.
The chip learns as fast as it recognizes and it doesnt matter if it is images,
video, voice or data from a spreadsheet,
as long as it is converted to digital information.

achieved by prior awardee Saint Louis

University, sponsoring a team in the
SC13 Student Cluster Competition, as
well
as
underwriting
Indiana
Universitys booth. We will also be
demonstrating our zStax StorCore unified storage appliance, an enterpriselevel software-defined storage platform
based on open-source ZFS technology
and powered by NexentaStor.

SCSD: You have an interesting personal

history that influences your leadership
style and philosophy. Can you share
some of this with us?
EC: I have had much luck in my life
and career, and most importantly, I have
to thank the many great people that

Su p e r C o m p u te r Sh o w D a ily
analysis and visualization in an end-user
environment. ParaView users can quickly build visualizations to analyze their
data using qualitative and quantitative
techniques, and explore data interactively in 3D. ParaView was developed to
analyze extremely large datasets using
memory
computing
distributed
resources, but it is also a powerful tool on
a standard desktop or laptop computer.
To augment these products,
Kitware is contributing to the collaborative efforts on the Data Analysis at
Extreme (DAX) toolkit and Portable
Data-Parallel
Visualization
and
Analysis Library (PISTON). Both of
these efforts are targeted to delivering
extremely scalable data analysis functionality using current and next generation processors including multi- and
many-core architectures. With the
architectures of DAX and PISTON,
researchers will be able to leverage
boards and barebones: 1U cold storage
barebone, 2U SSD cache barebone, 3U
GPGPU card barebone, 4U 60 3.5 inch
HDD barebone, Mini ITX Intel Avoton
board, and Half Width Intel Denlow
board.
Seeing the growth potential of this
industry segment, ASRock decided to
fund a new subsidiary, ASRock Rack
Inc. ASRock Rack Inc. aims to bring
the market a fast, flexible, efficient
product design and distribute business
model, which should have the ability
to rock the industry. Like Zara or
UniQlo in the clothing business, we
want to bring a similar fast response
product design and distribution model
to the server industry. We believe it is
where the industry is going, and can

SCSD: What potential applications will

this technology enable?

BM: As I mentioned, this pattern

recognition hardware is based on very
simple, but highly scalable memory
processing elements. You can just use a
few of them or a lot depending on
the application needs, with no change
in latency for a decision. So applications can range from using a small
number of them to monitor a set of signals or control a motor, to using more
for doing gesture recognition locally on
a handheld to large arrays handling
searching through a data base to detect
malicious viruses or find that scene in a
video that you are looking for. We are

helped me along the way. Having

grown up in the former East Germany, I
saw the effects of a general disregard
for an individuals personal growth and
achievement. I have come to believe
and experience that enduring success
requires leadership that shows an unwavering ambition for the organization to
thrive, and a passion for building teams
that enjoy working together towards a
common goal.
SCSD: Tell us more about how you put
this into practice.

EC: First, attracting the right people to

join our team is critical. I firmly believe
that people drive company objectives,
not the other way around. Second, we

VTK and ParaView to move their work

to the exascale.
To support its visualization and
analysis products, Kitware provides customers with a variety of advanced software development services. As a flexible
and agile organization, Kitware has experience both in leading large-scale collaborative teams to tackle some of todays
toughest research challenges, and in
developing custom, proprietary software
solutions for commercial customers.
Representatives are available at booth
4207 to demonstrate how Kitwares highperformance computing and visualization services can be tailored to the needs
of both research organizations and commercial product companies.
Visit Kitware at booth 4207 during SC13.
For more information, visit www
.kitware.com, call 518-371-3971 or
email kitware@kitware.com.

bring enormous value to our customers

and the whole market, said LL Shiu,
Chief Operating Officer of ASRock
and Chief Executive Officer of
ASRock Rack.
View the exciting video of the ASRock
extreme
computing
server
at
www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIYDuJV5D0&list=UUK2t9Vtqq7AYKXCShevGcmA
&index=2.
For more product information,
please visit www.asrock.com/news/
show/CeBit2013.

During SC13, visit ASRock at booth

4322. For more information, visit
www.asrock.com, call +886-2-55599600
or
email
ASRockRack_sales@
asrockrack.com.

very good at looking at unstructured

data in parallel and making fuzzy decisions based on incomplete data. So
applications like machine vision for
parts assembly or product inspection,
finding a fingerprint match against millions instantaneously for crime scene
investigation or gesture control to get
rid of all those remotes are just a few
examples. There are many practical
examples that can utilize the technology long before truly autonomous
machines become an everyday reality.

During SC13, visit Cognimem at booth

3609. For more information, visit
www.cognimem.com, call 916-358-9483
or email info@cognimem.com.

grow the company based on our core

competencies. Its easy to get distracted
and reach for new emerging technologies and markets, but unless it builds on
what we can do best, we wont do it.
Lastly, good decision making is based
on accurate data. To obtain accurate
data we need to report and review all
facts, whether they are good or bad. A
culture of honest communication and
transparency, internal and external to
our organization, is core to the success
of our business.

Visit Silicon Mechanics and meet Eva

Cherry at booth 3126 during SC13. For
more information, visit www.siliconmechanics.com, call 425-424-0000, or
email info@siliconmechanics.com.

Mo n d a y, N o ve m b e r 1 8 , 2 0 1 3

Su p e r C o m p u te r Sh o w D a ily

FIFTEEN INVITED SPEAKERS

TAKE THE PODIUM AT SC13
Fifteen speakers are set to share their perspectives with the supercomputing community as part of the invited talks program at SC13. These talks provide a
long-term perspective and put multiple
Adaptive Computing (Contd. from p. 1)

RC: Adaptive Computing enables large

enterprises in oil and gas, financial, manufacturing, research and government to
perform simulations and analyze big data
faster, more accurately and most cost
effectively. Moab manages and schedules
all available datacenter resources including HPC, cloud and big data, as one,
turning the logjam into an orderly workflow that greatly increases throughput
and productivity. Because Moab oversees
priorities, resource requirements, SLAs
and more, it can adapt to business priorities, delivering the invaluable insights the
enterprise needs to make game-changing,
data-driven decisions.

SCSD: What sets Adaptive apart and

allows you to process intensive simulations and big data analysis better than
your competition?
SGI (Contd. from p. 1)

company in the past year?

JT: The broadening focus on Big Data and

need for our expertise. SGI has been a
driving force in high-performance computing for nearly two decades, and has built
several of the worlds fastest supercomputers. What surprises many is that SGI is also
a significant global storage provider, shipping more than 600PBs annually, and has
helped customers manage some of the
worlds largest data environments costefficiently for many years as well.
While there is much hype in the market, the reality is Big Data is revolutionizing industries. We are at an early stage as
business and government agencies are just
beginning to understand how. SGIs heritage in HPC and high-volume storage is
helping customers accelerate this understanding and unlock value within Big Data
to achieve business breakthroughs.
Clustered Systems (Contd. from p. 4)

code compilation.
Saying its a software defined system makes it sound easy, but it takes a
tightly integrated and flexible hardware
platform to provide the Super Node foundation. Clustered Systems ExaBlade is
such a platform. The base unit of the
ExaBlade is a five chassis blade rack
inclusive of a power distribution and
cooling. With a minimum of 100kW
power, scalable to twice that, quiet two
phase cooling, and PUEs approaching 1,
it simply eliminates power, power densiAberdeen (Contd. from p. 4)

all SSD array. As a result, Aberdeen is

delivering this high performance along
with affordability and our industry leading
five year warranty to back up the quality.

research insights into broader context.

This years speakers will address
the ways in which HPC and supercomputing are shaping modern scientific
and engineering discovery, and the

RC: Adaptive Computing is a pioneer in

private/hybrid cloud, technical computing and large-scale scheduling, holding
30-plus patents with more than 20 more
pending. We are one of the few companies with extensive experience in all
three areas HPC, Cloud and Big Data.
Adaptive manages many of the worlds
largest private/hybrid cloud and technical
computing environments with Moab, its
award-winning optimization and scheduling software. Moabs recent recognitions include the Gartner Cool Vendor,
HPCWires Readers Choice and the Red
Herring 100. Adaptive has more than 300
global customers that make the world a
better place by developing cancer treatments, helping first responders during
natural disasters, predicting the weather,
discovering the origins of the universe,
lowering energy prices and emissions
and so much more. All of this would not
be possible without a product like Moab.

SCSD: What do you anticipate to be your

greatest challenge in the year ahead?

JT: Awareness in the commercial

enterprise. SGI solutions are utilized to
fulfill highly data intensive application
needs in petascale environments spanning federal government, defense and
strategic systems, physical and life sciences, manufacturing design, financial
services and more.
However, these applications generally fall outside the mainstream enterprise
so many of the advantages we bring,
from solution design and power up and
go deployment, to cost-savings and
world-class support, are less well known.
With the challenge of Big Data reaching
beyond historically massive data environments to mainstream IT, new solutions are needed. We open a lot of eyes
when SGI solutions are first introduced.
SCSD: Are you introducing any new

ty and cooling as limitations.

The front of each of the five independent chassis comprises 16 compute/storage blades and a PDU blade.
Each chassis can be configured as a
Super Node or the entire rack can be
combined into one larger Super Node.
These front blades are interconnected
by four rear networking blades in each
chassis. These provide a redundant GbE
management network and a redundant
PCIe interconnect between all blades
and other chassis. All the memory on all
the compute blades is shared via the
PCIe network. All the storage on the

Now the challenge is to push this performance out of the box. There are two
10GBASE-T ports in the system as
default, and 6 PCI-E 3.0 x8 slots available
for that purpose. We performed our tests
with default iSCSI function on our NAS

ways in which HPC is shaping the relationships among nations.

Some of the speakers are: 2011
Nobel Laureate Saul Perlmutter, who
will explain how integrating big data
led to the discovery of the acceleration
of the universe's expansion; 2010
National Medal of Science Winner,
Warren Washington, who will review
challenges facing users of the

SCSD: What are the new products

and technologies youve recently
announced?

RC: Just a few weeks ago, we announced

five newly awarded patents for our intelligent power management that enable
Moab to significantly increase energy
efficiency. The patent concepts include:
calendar-based power capping, which
helps navigate power quotas by identifying optimal times to operate data-intensive simulations; on-demand power management, which optimizes workload by
properly allocating resources and powering off servers as needed; and predictive
placement, which employs power-aware
policies to manage energy consumption
within data centers more evenly and save
on cooling costs
Adaptive will announce the Moab
Task Manager at SC13, which greatly
increases throughput on short/small
products?

JT: Yes. In addition to continuing innovation of our market leading super computer, SGI ICE X, and unparalleled
shared memory system, SGI UV, we are
introducing three new solutions: SGI
InfiniteData Cluster, delivering breakthrough compute and storage density that
scales seamlessly from a small number of
cluster nodes to several thousand; SGI
ObjectStore, delivering innovative
object-based storage; and new intelligent
management of active archives for our
SGI InfiniteStorage Gateway. These new
solutions enable organizations to perform
Big Data analytics with faster and greater
insight, achieve the extreme capacity and
scale needed for Big Data storage, and
manage storage investments more cost
effectively.
SCSD: What distinguishes your products
from the competition?

disk blades may be integrated into a

larger parallel file system that may
encompass the Super Node or the complete HPC system.
The Super Node can be accessed via
front connectors on the compute blades
or by virtual I/O through the interconnecting PCIe network to an external
interface box.
There are no placement limitations
as every slot of every chassis is identical.
The user need only specify the type and
number of required blades to satisfy the
Super Node performance requirements.
Currently, Clustered Systems offers
and utilized default IPMI KVM capability
to monitor the results when we were away.
AberNAS N21 all SSD NAS, 320K
IOPS 4K Random Reads sustained with a
five year warranty at an affordable price.
Onboard dual 10GbE ports. 6 PCI-E 3.0

17

Community Earth System Model for

climate and Earth system simulations;
Northwestern Universitys Alok N.
Choudhary, who will address the question, "What are the challenges and
opportunities for extreme scale systems to be an effective platform?; and
The University of California at
Berkeleys Vern Paxson, who will
examine scaling issues.

jobs. Moab Task Manager allows 100x

faster throughput, launches 10 jobs per
node per second and reduces latency.
Stay tuned for more details in the
announcement released first thing
tomorrow morning.
In booth 3113, we are demoing our
Moab Task Manager along with many of
our other products: Moab HPC Suite
Enterprise and Remote Visualization
Editions;
Adaptive
Workload
Optimization Pack with Moab HPC
Suite, Intel Messaging Passing Interface
Library and HP Insight Cluster
Management Utility Connector; and
Topology Aware Scheduling for 3-D
Torus Networks.

During SC13, visit Adaptive Computing

at booth 3113. For more information,
visit www.adaptivecomputing.com, call
801-717-3700 or email solutions@
adaptivecomputing.com.

JT: SGI achieves competitive differentiation through compute and storage solutions built with innovative architectural
advantages utilizing industry standard
components and tight integration. By
designing for performance, power, density and scalability, optimizing interconnections between layers and engineering
to reduce overhead and accelerate
deployment, SGI solutions deliver industry leading speed, scale and efficiency.

SCSD: How can our readers find out

more about your company?

JT: Please stop by the SGI booth 2709,

as we have many solution experts on
hand, as well as product demonstrations,
white papers and more. Please also visit
us at www.sgi.com.
Visit SGI at booth 2709 during SC13. For
more information, visit www.sgi.com, call
800-800-7441 or email nehrman@sgi.com.

dual two socket Intel S2600JF server

blades and PCIe switch blades. Coming
soon are a full range of complementary
products including dual processorcoprocessor blades, disk storage blades,
flash memory storage blades, data base
(large memory) blades and high-performance network blades with direct IB and
10GbE connectivity.

During SC13, visit Clustered Systems

Company, Inc. at booth 742. For more
information, visit www.clusteredsystems.com, call 408-327-8100 or email
phil@clusteredsystems.com.
x8 available expansion slots.

Visit Aberdeen during SC13 at booth

1738. For more information, visit
www.aberdeeninc.com, call 800-500-9526
or email salesinfo@aberdeeninc.com