Korean Air Force Selects SGI to Accelerate Weather Forecasting

SGI (NASDAQ:SGI), a trusted leader in technical computing, today announced that the Korean Air Force’s 73^rd 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 country’s defense forces.

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.

"Having previously used a government supercomputing facility, we wanted the fastest available cluster system for weather forecasting,” said the head of the group responsible for weather forecasting for the Korean Air Force. "This 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.”

"SGI Korea has done an outstanding job of understanding the customer's needs and exceeding expectations,” said Philip Chua, managing director and vice president of Asia Pacific and Japan at SGI. "The SGI Altix ICE 8400 solution provided will accelerate results in both low altitude and high altitude weather forecasting for the Korean Air Force.”

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.

"The 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,” said Rajeeb Hazra, general manager of High Performance Computing at Intel. "We 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 Force’s 73^rd Weather Group.”

About SGI

SGI, a trusted leader in technical computing, is focused on helping customers solve their most demanding business and technology challenges. Visit www.sgi.com for more information.

© 2011 SGI. SGI and Altix are registered trademarks or trademarks of Silicon Graphics International Corp. or its subsidiaries in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective holders.