In this picturesque spot in southern England, not far from a 13th Century cathedral that watches over the town of Salisbury, is one arm of the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), the center of scientific excellence for the UK Ministry of Defence. Despite its image in the popular press, Porton contains some of the finest toxic handling facilities in the world, and is renowned worldwide for the quality of its research.

With its unique global shared-memory architecture, the SGI Altix server allows users to hold entire data sets completely in memory. This streamlines productivity by enabling scientists and engineers to avoid having to process large data sets in pieces. As a result, they can run more calculations against their data to reach conclusions faster.

The flexibility of the Altix platform, which supports independent scaling of processors, memory, and I/O, was important to 4 Dstl. So was the system’s support for industry-standard, 64-bit Linux® implementations and Intel Itanium 2 processors. “We can scale the Altix components independently, so if we need more CPUs, we can grow those, or if we need more memory, we can scale that as well,” Preston says. “A 64-bit platform that supports major codes used in government and commercial fields was a vital criterion. This allows us to take the longer-term view for this research project and will give even more projects access to the system as needed.”


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