After much anticipation, on Monday, June 18, 2012, users will have access to Pleiades' 24 new SGI ICE X (Sandy Bridge) racks containing 3,456 Intel Xeon E5-2670 processors. The expanded system now comprises 126,720 cores in 182 racks, and has a total of 23,552 Intel Xeon processors. This latest upgrade will deliver about a 30% increase in Pleiades' peak processing power.

Users are strongly encouraged to begin by reading the article Preparing to Run on Pleiades' Sandy Bridge Nodes which contains important information, including:

• Recompiling your code to run on Sandy Bridge
• Using the new Advanced Vector Extensions feature
• Running PBS jobs on Sandy Bridge

A subset of the nodes will be available in the devel queue for code development and debugging.

Jobs may be submitted beginning immediately, and they will run as soon as the Sandy Bridge nodes become available on Monday.

To familiarize users with various aspects of the new hardware, a training webinar will be held on June 21st and June 27th. For more information, please see HECC User Training.

If you have any questions or need more information, please contact the NAS Control Room at support@nas.nasa.gov, (800)331-8737, or (650) 604-4444.