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SGI Cyclone™ - HPC Cloud

Introducing the HPC Cloud

Cyclone™ is the world's first large scale on-demand cloud computing service specifically dedicated to technical applications. Cyclone capitalizes on over twenty years of SGI HPC expertise to address the growing science and engineering technical markets that rely on extremely high-end computational hardware, software and networking equipment to achieve rapid results. Cyclone supports a number of leading applications partners and five technical domains, including computational fluid dynamics, finite element analysis, computational chemistry and materials, computational biology and ontologies.

Two Service Models

Cyclone is available in two service models: Software as a Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). With SaaS, Cyclone customers can significantly reduce time to results by accessing leading-edge open source applications and best-of-breed commercial software platforms from top Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). The IaaS model enables customers to install and run their own applications.

Applications Domain Expertise

With Software as a Service, Cyclone delivers access to leading-edge open source applications and best-of-breed commercial software platforms from top Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). Supported applications in these domains include OpenFOAM®, NUMECA, Acusolve, LS-Dyna®, Gaussian, Gamess, NAMD, Gromacs, LAMMPS, BLAST, FASTA; HMMER, ClustalW and OntoStudio.

Easy Access for Periodic and Experimental Users

SGI has partnered with Nimbis Services Inc. to streamline the acquisition, provisioning, and use of SGI's Cyclone "Results on Demand" platforms, applications, and services for US customers requiring fast access to on-demand high performance computing (HPC) resources. Nimbis provides a familiar ecommerce store front, with click-through agreements and credit card and PayPal (as well as PO) payment options. SGI Cyclone's full suite of computing, application and domain expertise resources can be ordered quickly and simply by registering and accessing the Cyclone online catalog on the Nimbis website.

Technical Computing Requires a Dedicated Cloud

The SGI technology at Cyclone's core is comprised of some of the world's fastest supercomputing hardware architectures, including Intel® Xeon® and Itanium® processors-based SGI® Altix® scale-up, Altix® ICE scale-out and Altix® XE hybrid clusters. The hybrid architecture offers either NVIDIA® Tesla GPUs or AMD FireStream™ GPU Compute Accelerators, both for floating point double precision; Tilera accelerators are supported for integer workloads. High performance SGI InfiniteStorage systems are available for scratch space and for long-term archival of customer data.

At the system software level, Cyclone offers a flexible computing environment with the choice of Novell® SUSE® or Red Hat® Linux® operating systems, further performance-optimized through the addition of SGI® ProPack™. Altair PBS Professional® and SGI® ISLE™ Cluster Manager provide system scheduling and management.

Additional Information

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