SGI is taking its technical computing expertise to the cloud.
SGI is rolling out Cyclone, its cloud computing
environment for the HPC (high-performance computing) market, which
officials called an extension of what the company has been offering in
traditional and modular data center settings.
“This is our entrance into the cloud computing
space,” Geoffrey Noer, senior director of product marketing at SGI,
said in an interview.
Most cloud computing offerings from top tech vendors
are aimed at business applications, such as CRM, ERP, e-mail and
databases, Noer said. SGI is keeping its sights set on the HPC space,
with support for such technical applications as openFOAM for
computational fluid dynamics tasks, LS-Dyna for finite element
analysis, Gaussian for computational chemistry and materials, BLAST and
FASTA for computational biology workloads, and OntoStudio for ontology
computations.
Cyclone will give customers that need more computing
power for their applications the ability to leverage SGI’s computing
capabilities, Noer said. In addition, it will enable organizations that
in the past may not have had access to such computing power that
ability to run their high-end technical applications.
Rackable Systems last year bought SGI,
which was a longtime high-end systems maker, and adopted the SGI name.
The company now is leveraging the powerful computing capability that
SGI brought into the fold to create Cyclone, Noer said.
The cloud computing environment will be powered by
Altix scale-up and scale-out clusters, as well as Altix XE hybrid
systems, all powered by Intel’s Xeon or Itanium processors. High-speed
networking comes from InfiniBand technologies or SGI’s NUMALink
offering.
The hybrid clusters offer either Nvidia’s Tesla GPUs or
graphics capabilities from Advanced Micro Devices’ Firestream
technology to help accelerate floating point double precision workloads.
In addition, the hybrid clusters will offer accelerators from Tilera for integer workloads.
Customers also can access SGI’s InfiniteStorage products for either short-term or long-term storage needs, Noer said.
They also can choose from Novell’s SUSE or Red
Hat Linux operating systems, both of which will see performance
benefits with the inclusion of SGI’s ProPack technology. Scheduling and
management of the clusters comes through Altair PBS Professional and
SGI’s Isle Cluster Manager offerings.
Organizations will be able to use Cyclone in two
ways: in a SAAS (software as a service) mode, where they can gain
access to applications; or in an IAAS (infrastructure as a service)
model, where they can run their own applications on Cyclone’s systems.
Support is available through SGI Global Services.
Access to Cyclone is available immediately, with
pricing starting at 95 cents per HPC core hour, and 20 cents per
Gigabyte per month for storage.
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