"Tamanon" - the largest civic cluster in Israel - was inaugurated at the Technion

TNN Telecom installed an SGI supercomputer at the Technion in a deal of more than NIS 2 million

The TNN Telecom company from the stock market Rafek group, which won the Technion tender for a supercomputer with an advanced computer made by SGI, which it exclusively represents in Israel, has completed the installation of the system that has already gone into operation. TNN Telecom won the tender, which was worth more than two million shekels, over a number of major competitors in the Israeli computing market.

The SGI computer, which was named "Octopus" and is the largest civilian cluster (server cluster) in Israel today, was installed in the computer center at the Technion, where it replaced a large SUN computer. The computer will be used mainly by researchers from the Minerva Centers and the Russell Berry Institute for Nanotechnology, but also by other researchers engaged in a variety of fields where high-performance computing is needed.

The Technion bought the computer with all the management tools - administrative and application, compilers, and training for researchers in the optimization and acceptance of the research programs for the new computing architecture.

The SGI Infiniband Cluster supercomputer, equipped with more than 1260 cores, has 96 gigabytes of memory per node when the nodes are linked by the Infiniband communication protocol. Yes, it has computational graphics cards, and a storage system with an initial volume of 60 terabytes.

Israel Vinman, director of SGI activities at TNN Telecom, says: "TNN Telecom considers it a great privilege to be the supplier of the supercomputer at the Technion, the largest technological institution in Israel and the habitat of many of the most important researchers and studies in Israel and in the world, here grew tremendous engineering projects and studies that won their researchers the Nobel Prize . Thanks to the very professional technical staff of the computer center, and the many years of experience of the SGI staff, putting the computer into operation was quick.
The supercomputer will serve as an aid in academic research, and additional researchers joining the cluster will increase its power and use, and advance scientific research."

In a festive ceremony to inaugurate the "Octopus" held at the Technion's computer center, Prof. Daniel Rittel, senior deputy to the president of the Technion, said: "The Octopus puts us in line with the leading academic institutions in the world."
Dr. Yota Ilichman, scientific attaché at the German Embassy in Israel, said that the octopus will be another basis for academic cooperation between the Technion and the Minerva centers in Germany.

Dr. Joanne Adler, a researcher in the Technion's Faculty of Physics, detailed the variety of research topics being carried out with the SGI supercomputer, and noted that the Octopus is an infrastructure to which researchers can attach their nodes, simply and without high overheads.
Dr. Adler noted that researchers already report an 11 times higher speed of running code with the octopus, compared to the computer that preceded it.