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SGI Demonstrates 'Out-Compute to Out-Compete' Technology

Driving home the well-proven maxim of SGI CEO Bob Bishop, "to out-compete, you must out-compute," Silicon Graphics is demonstrating how its compute, storage and visualization solutions are shattering the conventions of high-performance computing (HPC) at Supercomputing Conference 2004. An array of new products, news of top industry honors and HPC achievements, and a host of presentations and conference sessions will bring SGI's technology strategy into sharp focus in this annual gathering of the world's most demanding computer users.

SGI returns to SC2004 after toppling Japan's Earth Simulator from its perch as the world's fastest supercomputer with the historic 10,240-processor NASA Columbia system, an achievement made all the more significant in that the supercomputer, built from 20 SGI Altix systems, was built and fully deployed at NASA in only 15 weeks.

Defying the accepted norms of traditional HPC solutions, SGI systems are based on industry-standard technologies and components, such as Intel Itanium 2 processors and a 64-bit Linux operating environment. As a result, SGI systems are perennial price/performance leaders that can be deployed rapidly so innovators in government, homeland security, scientific research, pharmaceutical, energy, aerospace and manufacturing markets can address the world's most demanding challenges. Worldwide customer acceptance of SGI solutions continues to escalate, while SGI products recently secured a record eight HPCwire Innovation Awards from the journal's editors and readers.

Groundbreaking Technology On Display At SGI Booth

At the SGI Booth, SC2004 attendees witnessed the latest and most advanced compute, storage and visualization products from SGI.

• Japan's Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN), which recently chose a 16-processor Altix 350 system as a host computer of its MDGRAPE-3 system, demonstrated this low-cost high-performance accelerator for protein modeling.
• YottaYotta demonstrated a new paradigm for lowering storage costs and increasing productivity among geographically distributed computing environments deploying the SGI InfiniteStorage Shared Filesystem CXFS and Data Lifecycle Management Solution with YottaYotta's GSX 2400 NetStorager.
• The Integrated Workflow area in SGI's booth demonstrated the power of combining HPC (Altix 350), Visualization (Silicon Graphics Prism and Visual Area Networking) and Storage (SGI InfiniteStorage CXFS) into a data- centric computing model.
• SGI will participate in SC2004's StorCloud initiative, comprising state- of-the-art heterogeneous devices and technology to build a virtual on-site "storage on request" area network capability to support researchers and demonstrate high-bandwidth applications at the conference.
• Along with the existing SGI Altix server and supercomputer line, SGI will publicly unveil its Altix 3700 Bx2 system. The new model doubles the bandwidth, compute density and price/performance of previous Altix 3700 servers. SGI also demonstrated an Altix 350 system cluster via Voltaire Infiniband.
• SGI InfiniteStorage demonstrations address workflow within intelligent consolidation, data lifecycle management and data protection. Demonstrations included file serving, heterogeneous SAN and CXFS, DLM Server, new and pre- release products, customer-based big data over a WAN, and several partner collaborations.
• SGI will debut to the HPC community the new Silicon Graphics Prism, a complete, advanced visualization system that combines standards-based Intel Itanium 2 processors and the Linux operating environment with SGI's world- renowned advanced graphics. Demonstrations included Visual Area Networking.
• Based on the success of SGI's highly scalable NUMAflex architecture, SGI demonstrated development work on melding its powerful NUMAlink interconnect technology with the flexible, efficient, and reconfigurable processing power offered by today's FPGA technologies.

Throughout the SGI booth and all SC2004 activities, SGI will also highlight the contributions of key partners who have helped drive the success of the company's HPC solutions in the scientific, research and engineering markets. These partners include:

• Intel
• Christie
• SGI User Group
• Engenio
• Dataram
• S2io
• Transact in Memory
• Novell
• Xcelerix
• Brocade
• Objectivity
• Versant

About SGI

SGI, also known as Silicon Graphics Inc, is a 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, providing technologies for homeland security and defense 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. With offices worldwide, the company is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., and can be found on the Web at http://www.sgi.com/.