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LANL SELECTS ADVANCED VISUALIZATION FROM SGI

SGI announced that the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory, N.M., has purchased a Silicon Graphics Onyx4 UltimateVision, the world's largest and most powerful advanced visualization system, to help ensure the continued safety, reliability and performance of America's nuclear stockpile without underground testing.

The 80-processor, 34-pipe Onyx4 UltimateVision system, scheduled for installation this quarter and subject to acceptance criteria, offers many times the visualization capability of any other computing system available making it the only system able to interactively visualize the most complex data sets. Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) will use the Onyx4 UltimateVision system as part of the Department of Energy's Stockpile Stewardship Program, a key component of which is the Advanced Simulation and Computing Initiative (ASCI), designed to accelerate the development of the computational power DOE scientists and engineers to meet the demanding visualization needs of virtual testing.

One of the most pressing problems facing LANL's ASCI program is managing and manipulating the terabytes of data required to transform data sets into visual representations. Traditional graphics-focused solutions are unable to meet the vast data requirements essential for visualization. However, the new Onyx4 system's innovative scalable system architecture and large shared memory are specifically designed to rapidly digest multi-terabyte data sets while focusing dozens of microprocessors and graphics processors effortlessly to tackle problems many times larger than ever before possible.

"Researchers at Los Alamos are confronted with enormous data sets. The scalability and throughput of Onyx4 provides new technology to visualize those data sets, and can rapidly deliver granular-level results," said Bob Tomlinson, simulation support manager, LANL ASCI Program. more

"This is the largest, most powerful visualization system in the world," said Shawn Underwood, director of marketing, Visual Systems Group, SGI. "This Onyx4 system will be capable of powering over 120 megapixels of screen area and has a fill rate of over 40 gigapixels per second, which is enough pixels per second to put a new image on the average screen of every computer in the world nearly 5000 times a day."

The United States suspended underground nuclear testing in 1992 and established the Stockpile Stewardship Program in 1995 to continuously monitor the condition of America's nuclear weapons stockpile, assess the findings, and perform maintenance and refurbishment as needed.

About LANL

LANL is operated by the University of California for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) of the U.S. Department of Energy and works in partnership with NNSA's Sandia and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories to support NNSA in its mission. Los Alamos enhances global security by ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, developing technologies to reduce threats from weapons of mass destruction and solving problems related to energy, environment, infrastructure, health and national security concerns.

About SGI

SGI, also known as Silicon Graphics, Inc., is the world's leader in high- performance computing, visualization and storage. SGI's vision is to provide technology that enables the most significant scientific and creative breakthroughs of the 21st century. Whether it's sharing images to aid in brain surgery, finding oil more efficiently, studying global climate or enabling the transition from analog to digital broadcasting, SGI is dedicated to addressing the next class of challenges for scientific, engineering and creative users. SGI was named on FORTUNE magazine's 2003 list of "Top 100 Companies to Work For." With offices worldwide, the company is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., and can be found on the Web at http://www.sgi.com.