SGI servers chosen for NASA environmental data work

A project to upgrade the computing and data management capabilities at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center includes servers from Silicon Graphics Inc., said officials from the company with its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

SGI Altix servers and SGI InfinteStorage solutions will be used for the project, company officials added.

The platform should provide new and more powerful ways to analyze environmental data, and Goddard engineers can use the latest codes from NASA to achieve a faster time-to-solution.

Among the first projects scheduled is an initiative to reanalyze 30 years of Earth weather and climate data captured by satellites. The expansion of computational capability and data management will allow engineers to sift through and recalculate decades of information to arrive at more accurate conclusions and more in-depth insights about changes in the Earth's climate since the 1970s.

"NASA was SGI's very first customer in 1982, and since then the agency and its scientific missions have helped us repeatedly push the limits of computing, visualization and storage technology," said Bob Bishop, chairman and chief executive officer, SGI.

To assess the NASA center's computing needs, SGI began collaboration in January with Computer Sciences Corp., which oversaw leasing and integration.

Other vendors in the collaboration are Altair Engineering Inc., which integrated the PBS Professional workload management solution for Altix and InfiniteStorage deployment; DataDirect Networks, which provided networked technology support for the InfiniteStorage solution; and Intel Corp., which provides the scalable Intel Itanium 2 processors that drive SGI Altix systems.