Hoff and Associates Joins SGI as Channel Partner

By DE Editors

SGI (Mountain View, CA) recently announced that Hoff and Associates has joined the SGI Channel Partner program and is now offering SGI technology to its customers nationwide.

Based in Plymouth, MI, Hoff and Associates is a high-performance compute (HPC) solutions provider for engineering, product development, and product testing. The company has background in compute-intensive CAE software applications, and it specializes in the deployment of HPC systems optimized for engineering needs. Hoff and Associates will sell SGI Altix XE clusters, SGI Altix 4700 high-performance shared-memory solutions, and SGI InfiniteStorage systems.

"Each code has its own very specific needs and quirks and nuances, in terms of high-speed computing, and knowing how it's best implemented on these cluster systems — and also knowing the specific needs of the code — is key," said Don Coburn, director of HPC solutions for Hoff. "For instance, LS-DYNA is very CPU-intensive, but not really memory or I/O intensive, Abaqus, on the other hand, is extremely I/O intensive, very memory and memory bandwidth-intensive, and requires a different hardware to run optimally. We're pleased to offer SGI systems because our customers look for price-performance. Today, Altix XE clusters provide the best bang for the buck, compared to anything else that we've looked at. And that's based on benchmark after benchmark after benchmark, and every CAE application that we implement. In the last few months we ran two of the most extensive benchmarks that we ever had and Altix XE beat our traditional Opteron offerings hands down on every single application."

In addition to the SGI Altix XE cluster environment, which runs Dual-core Intel Xeon processors, Hoff and Associates will offer the SGI Altix family of servers with shared memory architecture running Intel Itanium 2 processors. SGI Altix systems all run Red Hat or Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 environments.

For more information, visit sgi.com.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company's website.