SGI Intros Cyclone Cloud Computing for Technical Applications

February 15, 2010

Cyclone is the world's first large-scale, on-demand cloud computing service specifically dedicated to technical applications.

Until now, cloud solutions have been primarily focused on running important business applications like CRM, ERP, email and other database programs. Cyclone capitalizes on over 20 years of SGI high performance computing (HPC) expertise to specifically address the growing science and engineering technical markets that rely on high-end computational hardware, software and networking equipment to achieve rapid results. Cyclone initially 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.

"Cyclone enables an exciting new generation of discovery," said Dr. Michael Levine, co-founder and co-scientific director of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC). "Large supercomputing centers such as ours will benefit from the ability to scale computing capacity dynamically, on-demand, and experiment with the latest technologies."

Cyclone is available in two service models: Software as a Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). With the SaaS model, customers can significantly reduce time to results by accessing and fully exploiting Cyclone's pre-defined, pre-certified technical applications. The IaaS model allows customers to install and run their own applications.

"Cyclone meets customers' critical need to experience results quickly as they deploy their technical applications in traditional data centers, modular data centers or the cloud," said Mark J. Barrenechea, SGI CEO. "Over the Internet, customers can now gain access to the world's fastest, most advanced computers and pay for only what they use. Cyclone will help customers focus on their business or research instead of worrying about complex computers or infrastructure."

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

With Cyclone's SaaS model, SGI delivers access to open source applications and commercial software platforms from top Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). Supported applications include: OpenFOAM, NUMECA, Acusolve, LS-Dyna, Gaussian, Gamess, NAMD, Gromacs, LAMMPS, BLAST, FASTA, HMMER, ClustalW and OntoStudio. SGI expects to add additional domains and applications partners over time.

"More and more organizations that rely on HPC resources are investigating clouds for solutions that offer additional computing capacity and flexibility, and reduce or eliminate the need to make additional long-term investments in hardware," said Earl Joseph, IDC program vice president for high performance computing. "In a challenging economic climate, Cyclone is designed to provide access to both SGI HPC-focused servers and application expertise so that organizations can focus on their own science and research, rather than on purchasing and managing complex and expensive IT infrastructures."