Imperial College London has selected a massively parallel computer system from SGI for its central computing service.
The college has selected the SGI dual-rail Infiniband supercomputer, Altix ICE 8200 EX, which uses the latest Intel Xeon Nehalem processors.
An important role for the supercomputer will be complex process modelling such as computational fluid dynamics, and weather and ocean modelling.
The new system will also act as a stepping stone to the national academic supercomputer service HECToR (High End Computing Terascale Resources).
"Due to the complex nature of the target applications, speed, performance and low latency are critical factors for our HPC users," said Simon Burbidge, HPC coordination manager at Imperial College London.
"The new SGI installation has proven to perform very well across these attributes and will enable researchers at the university to tackle larger, more difficult problems than ever before," said Burbidge.
The blade architecture of the Altix ICE supports high densities - up to 512 processor cores in a single rack - and can be scaled to thousands of nodes.