Solving the World's Most Data Intensive Problems

SGI UV scales to extraordinary levels — up to 256 sockets (2560 cores, 4096 threads) with architectural support to 32,768 sockets (262,144 cores). Support for up to 16TB of global shared memory in a single system image enables SGI UV to remain highly efficient at scale for applications ranging from in-memory databases to a diverse set of data and compute-intensive HPC applications.

Scalable System Size

The SGI UV family consists of three models that enable users to optimally size their systems, achieving the correct balance of compute, memory and storage capability. SGI UV 10 is one of the most capable quad-socket rackmount servers available, whereas SGI UV 100 and SGI UV 1000 can scale a single system image to a maximum of 2560 cores. This is possible because of their innovative NUMAflex®, blade-based architecture.

SGI UV Models

• SGI UV 10 – In a 4U rackmount form factor, SGI UV 10 packs up to four sockets (40 cores, 80 threads), 64 DIMM slots and ten I/O expansion slots. With up to 1TB of shared memory, SGI UV 10 delivers up to .289 teraflops of compute power in a single system. SGI UV 10 is ideal for a diverse set of technical computing and enterprise applications.
• SGI UV 100 - Based on an industry-standard 19" (48.26cm) rackmount 3U form factor, SGI UV 100 addresses the mid-range market. SGI UV 100 scales to 96 sockets (960 cores, 1920 threads) and 12TB of shared memory in two racks. SGI UV 100 delivers up to 9.2 teraflops of compute power in a single system image.
• SGI UV 1000 - For maximum scalability, SGI UV 1000 ships as a fully integrated cabinet-level solution with up to 256 sockets (2560 cores, 4096 threads) and 16TB of shared memory in four racks. SGI UV 1000 delivers up to 24.6 teraflops of compute power in a single system image.

An Open Platform

The SGI UV architecture was developed to use industry standard technology. This results in the ability to use performance leading Intel® Xeon® processor E7 family CPUs and standard, off the shelf versions of Linux, as well as Windows Server. SGI UV runs unmodified versions of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 is also supported across the product line. By using industry standard components, the application ecosystem is unrivaled, allowing for any scalable applications to take advantage of SGI UV.

Flexible System Expansion and Storage Capabilities

Industry-standard PCI Express expansion slots open up countless possibilities for system configurations with seamless support for industry-standard networking, storage and graphics/GPU cards. This enables deployment of NVIDIA® Tesla™ GPUs to supercharge performance for many workloads. It also means full support for the entire line of SGI InfiniteStorage hardware and software products.

Model Comparison

The SGI UV product family from SGI is composed of the following versions:

SGI UV 10 Ideal for smaller compute and memory requirements. Typically referred to as Workgroup or Department servers. Rack mount - 4U in height Max per rack - 10 per rack 4 sockets / 40 cores (80 threads) / 1TB max per enclosure.
SGI UV 100 For mid-scale environments. Typically referred to as Department or Divisional servers. 3U enclosure with 2 blades installed 12 enclosures can fit into one 40U high rack Maximum system is 2 racks (24 enclosures, 48 blades) 96 sockets / 960 cores (1920 threads) / 12TB max per system (2 racks)
SGI UV 1000 The ultimate for compute and large data requirements. 42U high rack 16 blades maximum per enclosure 2 enclosures maximum per rack 64 sockets (640 cores, 1280 threads) maximum per rack 4 rack maximum SSI size Maximum 256 sockets (2560 cores, 4096 threads) per 4 rack system Maximum 8 terabytes per rack (16TB total per single system) Architectural provisioning for up to 32,000 blades

Hardware warranty coverage

• Available Monday through Friday, normal business hours (nine hours per day, determined locally)
• One-year on-site hardware repair and parts replacement with next-business-day on-site response time

Software warranty coverage

• Telephone technical assistance (first 90 days only)
• Software updates are not included
• Applies only to operating systems installed by SGI

• SGI UV Datasheet (PDF 626K)
• SGI UV Customer Testimonials (PDF 359K)

Customer Case Studies

• National Institute for Computational Sciences (PDF 698K)
• Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PDF 1.0M)
• University of Valencia (PDF 687K)
• 3M (PDF 492K)
• Masaryk University (PDF 719K)

White Papers

• Performance and Productivity Breakthroughs with Very Large Coherent Shared Memory: The SGI UV Architecture (PDF 488K)
• Virtualization Best Practices on SGI UV 1000 using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 KVM (PDF 1.8M)
• Zircon Adaptive Software on SGI UV 1000 for High Performance Data Analytics - Executive Summary (PDF 460K)
• Zircon Adaptive Software on SGI UV 1000 for High Performance Data Analytics (PDF 882K)
• A Hardware-Accelerated MPI Implementation on SGI UV Systems (PDF 476K)
• SGI UV System Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability: Optimizing RAS for the World's Fastest Supercomputer (PDF 814K)
• Shared Memory: Standards Scale Up with SGI UV (PDF 420K)
• Technical Advances in the SGI UV Architecture (PDF 809K)
• Application Migration for SSI Architectures (PDF 497K)

Industry Briefs

• IDC Technology Spotlight: New Data-Intensive Problems Need Supercomputers with Supersized Memories - registration required
• Faster Results, More Discovery - Large Memory Systems for Life Science Research (PDF 1.1M)
• Faster Results, More Science - Large Memory Systems for Science (PDF 1.4M)

Videos & Media

• Flash: SGI UV Technology Overview (will open in a new window)
• Images: SGI UV in the Image Library
• Webcasts & Podcasts
  • SGI UV Technology Overview - YouTube
  • Learn about the SGI UV design with Dr. Eng Lim Goh, CTO of SGI - YouTube
  • See a demo of the SGI UV with Dr. Eng Lim Goh, CTO of SGI - YouTube
  • Learn about SGI UV Markets with Bill Mannel, VP of Product Marketing at SGI (MP3 7.5M)
  • Hear the SGI UV Details with Jill Matzke, Director of Shared Memory Systems at SGI (MP3 8.7M)
  • Pervasive Datarush First to TeraCUPS Performance on Bioinformatics on SGI UV - insideHPC.com

Contributed Articles

• Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI CTO - insideHPC interview: The 16 Terabyte PC – SGI Bets on Exascale
• Jill Matzke, Director, Shared Memory Systems - talks about A Different Approach to Data
• Bill Mannel, SGI VP of Product Marketing - talks about Accelerating Business Intelligence

Press Releases

• COSMOS & Miracle Consortia Select SGI Technology to Close in on the Big Bang & Exoplanets - January 6, 2012
• Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center Selects SGI to Power the Next Generation of Scientific Research - December 5, 2011
• SGI® UV Achieves Largest Certified Configuration for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (Joint Release with Red Hat) - November 14, 2011
• Institute for Chemical Research at Kyoto University Selects SGI to Advance Computational Chemistry and Biological Research - November 1, 2011
• Hungarian National Information Infrastructure Development Institute Selects SGI to Power Advanced Scientific Research - October 4, 2011
• Tohoku University Selects SGI to Advance Fluid Science Research - August 22, 2011
• Swinburne University of Technology Selects SGI to Accelerate Astrophysics Research - July 13, 2011
• DTU Accelerates Metagenomic Research with SGI Altix UV - June 14, 2011
• SGI Marks Supercomputing Milestone with Over 500 Altix UV Systems Delivered - June 13, 2011
• UK Atomic Weapons Establishment Accelerates Engineering Efforts with SGI® Altix® UV - March 30, 2011
• SGI® Altix® UV Scales Microsoft® Windows Server® to Its Maximum - March 25, 2011
• SGI Announces World's Largest Windows Platform with Intel® Xeon® Architecture - March 15, 2011
• SGI Receives HPCwire Readers' and Editors' Choice Awards for Second Consecutive Year - November 16, 2010
• New SGI Jolt Technology for Altix UV Extends Shared Memory to Unprecedented Scale - November 15, 2010
• CESCA Boosts Scientific Research with SGI Altix UV - October 28, 2010
• A*STAR Accelerates Scientific Discovery with SGI Altix UV 1000 - September 22, 2010
• SGI Announces Support for Oracle Database 11g Release 2 and Sets New Java Benchmark Record - September 20, 2010
• University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute Accelerates Its Research with Addition of SGI Altix UV 1000 - August 30, 2010
• Cosmos Consortium Selects SGI to Accelerate Research on the Origin of the Universe - August 11, 2010
• SGI Altix UV 1000 World's Most Powerful Enterprise Java Application System - July 19, 2010
• SGI Announces First Shipments of Complete Altix UV 1000 Systems - June 1, 2010
• SGI Broadens Altix UV Shared Memory Server Line with New High Performance Quad-socket Altix UV 10 - May 27, 2010
• Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center Accelerates Scientific Research with SGI Altix UV - April 5, 2010
• SGI Introduces New Software Products to Enhance Manageability, Scale and Performance of SGI Hardware - March 30, 2010
• The Institute of Cancer Research Selects SGI Altix UV, World's Fastest Supercomputer, As Dedicated System for Cancer Research- January 26, 2010
• SGI Unveils Altix UV, the World's Fastest Supercomputer - November 16, 2009

Media Coverage

• computings.es - University of Valencia starts a new stage in the supercomputing field - March 2011
• The Register - SGI plunks Windows on big Altix UV supers - February 2011
• Zircon - Zircon announces record high performance data analytics benchmark results on SGI ALTIX UV 1000 (PDF) - December 2010
• NICS - RDAV and Nautilus Enter Full Production - September 2010
• Pervasive - Pervasive DataRush on SGI Altix UV 1000 Shatters Smith-Waterman Throughput Record by 43 Percent - September 27, 2010
• University of Tennessee - UT’s Supercomputer Nautilus Kicks into High Gear - September 15, 2010
• IDT - IDT Voltage Regulator Modules Power The World's Fastest Supercomputer - September 14, 2010
• EETimes - SGI ASIC is first step to exascale system - September 10, 2010
• HPCwire - NSF Awards Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center $2.8M Toward Shared-Memory System - July 29, 2010
• NCSA - NCSA to provide Ember as shared-memory resource for nation's researchers - March 2, 2010

SPECfp®

The SPECint_rate2006 and SPECfp_rate2006 are benchmarks where a number of copies of the application suite can be loaded at the same time. For large scale computing systems such at the SGI UV, this is a much better indication of the overall performance of the system. The SGI UV performs with world record speed on these tests.

SPECjbb®

The SPECjbb2005 (Java Server Benchmark) is SPEC's benchmark for evaluating the performance of server side Java. SPECjbb2005 evaluates the performance of server side Java by emulating a three-tier client/server system (with emphasis on the middle tier).

The record results show that SGI UV 1000 can excel in Java based web applications in the Internet market space, where scalability of JVMs with the number of web users and huge amount of web traffic are important for faster response time.

SPEC® and the benchmark name SPECint® and SPECfp® are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Competitive benchmark results stated above reflect results published on www.spec.org as of Sept. 1, 2010. The comparison presented above is based on the best performing servers currently shipping by IBM, ScaleMP and Oracle/Sun. For the latest SPEC CPU benchmark results, visit http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/.

SPEC® and the benchmark name SPECjbb® and are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Competitive benchmark results stated above reflect results published on www.spec.org as of Sept. 1, 2010. The comparison presented above is based on the best performing servers currently shipping by HP, Oracle/Sun, IBM, 3Leaf, and ScaleMP, For the latest SPEC CPU benchmark results, visit http://www.spec.org/jbb2005/.

• SGI UV System Administration 1
  This course provides the experienced Linux user with the skills and information needed to administer the SGI UV family of systems. Lab exercises are included to prepare students for the actual work environment.
• SGI UV System Administration 2
  This course provides the experienced Linux user with the skills and information needed to administer the SGI UV family of servers and superclusters. Lab exercises are included to prepare students for the actual work environment.
• SGI UV Advanced System Administration
  This course is intended for the system administrator who makes system configuration decisions for SGI UV systems.
• SGI UV System Analysis
  This course provides the system administrator with methodologies and tools to evaluate system performance, identify problems and recommend solutions. Students will learn to use Performance Co-Pilot and accounting to identify applications that may have performance problems.

Related Courses

• SGI Introduction to the Linux Operating System
  This course introduces students to basic command-line tools that the Linux operating system provides. The course covers the day-to-day tasks that are required to efficiently accomplish work on the system — from logging in to basic Bash shell programming. Lab exercises prepare students for the actual work environment. This course does not cover installation of the Linux operating system.
• SGI System Linux Administration
  This course introduces Linux command line system administration to users who have completed a basic Linux, UNIX or IRIX class. Topics include installation, RPM, user account management, partitioning disks, file system management, run levels, system and user processes, syslog-ng, basic system accounting and cron. Lab exercises are included to prepare students for the actual work environment.

SGI UV with Jolt Improvements:

* Comparing to a maximum scale 4 rack UV routerless system with 16GB DIMMs

For SGI UV systems that will require 2 or more racks, a slight modification has been made to the cabinet itself. In order to minimize cabling issues, SGI has created a cabling spacer which will reduce potential cabling problems, and provide a more robust environment for systems at a very large scale.