Supercomputers are used around the world for research and other purposes in colleges, universities, and in government installations. SGI has announced what it claims to be the world's fastest supercomputer.

The computer is called the Altix UV and it uses Intel Xeon CPUs inside. SGI calls Altix UV the fastest and most scalable shared memory supercomputer in the world. The Altix UV can be scaled from 32 to 2,048 cores with architectural provisioning for 262,144 cores.

The system supports up to 16TB of global shared memory in a single system image. The machine uses the SGI 15GB per second NUMAlink 5 and features the MPI Offload Engine acceleration. The machine is designed to run Novell SUSE or Red Hat Linux. Pricing is unknown.