The China National Satellite Meteorological Center has deployed China's largest shared-memory computer to support the launch program for the FENGYUN-3 satellite.

The SGI Altix system is powered by 1,280 Intel Itanium 2 processor cores and 4TB of shared memory. NSMC integrated the supercomputer with a 26TB SGI InfiniteStorage solution and the SGI InfiniteStorage Shared Filesystem CXFS.

FENGYUN-3 is China's second-generation polar-orbiting meteorological satellite which is scheduled for a 2008 launch. The scientists and engineers at NSMC are fine-tuning the software they developed to effectively ingest, process and distribute data sent by the new satellite.

"The reason we selected the SGI HPC solution for this mission critical application is because we will rely on the SGI interconnect, an extremely fast and low-latency fabric, to ensure optimum performance" said Jun Yang, director, National Satellite Meteorological Center. "We also appreciate the SGI Altix 4700 architecture's ability to scale to meet our future application requirements"

NSMC is an affiliate of the China Meteorological Administration. NSMC is responsible for ingesting and processing the data of Chinese and foreign meteorological satellites, and distributing those data and information products to users for application. Other responsibilities include establishing the ground segment of the Chinese meteorological satellite observation system, conducting applied research in satellite meteorology, and making plans and programs for developing the Chinese meteorological satellite system based on national requirements.