Science & Technology
Science and TechnologyScience and Technology 
Fri, March 25, 2011
Thu, March 24, 2011
Korean Air Force Selects SGI to Accelerate Weather Forecasting
FREMONT, Calif.--([ BUSINESS WIRE ])--[ SGI ] (NASDAQ:SGI), a trusted leader in technical computing, today announced that the Korean Air Forcea™s 73rd Weather Group has purchased and begun operations with a high performance computing (HPC) solution consisting of an [ SGI® Altix® ICE 8400 ] system to accelerate production and distribution of long-term weather forecasts to the countrya™s defense forces.
"SGI Korea has done an outstanding job of understanding the customer's needs and exceeding expectations"
The Altix ICE 8400 system has more than 1,700 processor cores built with Intel® Xeon® processors 5600 series, and 800 TB of SGI [ InfiniteStorage ] and [ Spectra Logic ] tape storage. It will be used for numerical weather forecasting and is projected to achieve twice the performance of the previous solution. The weather forecasting results obtained from this new system will be shared with other meteorological administrations to provide more accurate data for the Korean peninsula.
aHaving previously used a government supercomputing facility, we wanted the fastest available cluster system for weather forecasting,a said the head of the group responsible for weather forecasting for the Korean Air Force. aThis will provide us with faster and more immediate computing power and shorter analysis times, and will enable us to produce longer term forecasts in greater detail. Additionally, the project includes not only compute but also monitoring and administration services, plus archiving and security systems, as well as interconnection to outside agencies.a
aSGI Korea has done an outstanding job of understanding the customer's needs and exceeding expectations,a said Philip Chua, managing director and vice president of Asia Pacific and Japan at SGI. aThe SGI Altix ICE 8400 solution provided will accelerate results in both low altitude and high altitude weather forecasting for the Korean Air Force.a
The Korean Air Force selected a combination of SGI InfiniteStorage 4600 and Spectra Logic T380 and T50e to provide the highest degree of performance, reliability and flexibility for its storage requirements.
aThe ability to quickly and accurately forecast the weather is critical to the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people in East Asia and the entire Pacific Rim,a said Rajeeb Hazra, general manager of High Performance Computing at Intel. aWe are pleased to work with SGI to provide an HPC solution powered by Intel Xeon processors 5600 series that can intelligently adjust performance to data-intensive applications like those used by the Korean Air Forcea™s 73rd Weather Group.a
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