Stephen Hawking Says SGI Big Brain Can Help Unlock Secrets Of The Universe

Silicon Graphics International (SGI) has made a new UV series supercomputer – the SGI UV 2 (Big Brain Computer). And Professor Stephen Hawking was the first person to use the UV 2 Big Brain. The professor says that the immense computational power possessed by the supercomputer would help scientists solve cosmology data to be processed faster and help unlock the mysteries of the Universe. SGI is rolling out the second generation of their UV supercomputers at International Supercomputer Conference 2012 next week.


UV2 Blade Server, Image Credit : sgi.com

The UV2 is being called as the world’s largest shared memory system. It has 4,096 Intel Sandy Bridge cores and 64 terabytes of memory. At a peak I/O rate of four terabytes per second, the UV 2 could ingest the entire 10 terabyte contents of the US Library of Congress in less than three seconds easily. The supercomputer uses the Intel Xeon E5 processor and runs vanilla Linux software. The SGI UV 2 is greatly improved over its predecessor, the UV 1. here is the comparison chart below.

Comparison Between UV1 And UV2, Image Credit : inside-bigdata.com

Hawking said, “I am very pleased to be receiving the first SGI UV 2 supercomputer in the world. The flexible new UV 2 COSMOS system, soon to be supercharged with Intel’s MIC technology, will ensure that UK researchers remain at the forefront of fundamental and observational cosmology.”

UV 2, Image Credit : sgi.com

SGI UV 1 costs $50,000 but SGI UV2 will cost $30,000. SGI UV 2 also supports Intel’s MIC technology as well as NVIDIA Quadro GPUs and Tesla Accelerators.

Source : Inside Big Data, Data Center Knowledge

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Anatol

Anatol Rahman is the Editor at TheTechJournal. He loves complicated machineries, and crazy about robot and space. He likes cycling. Before joining TheTechJournal team, he worked in the telemarketing industry. You can catch him on Google+.

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