SGI launches new Flagship Altix 4000 PLATFORM

Combining industry-standard components and the
world's most powerful server architecture in a highly dense and deployable
form factor, Silicon Graphics (OTC: SGID) today unveiled a complete redesign
of its flagship Altix line with the SGIR AltixR 4000 platform. Capable of
tailoring hardware to application needs, Altix 4000 is poised to serve as
the foundation of the future of high-performance computing.
SGI has integrated its renowned scalable shared-memory SGIR NUMAflex(tm)
architecture with blade packaging to provide a platform with total
flexibility, fine-grained modularity, high density and excellent
serviceability. The resulting Altix 4000 is the first 64-bit LinuxR server
with a blade design that offers true "plug and solve" flexibility. Users can
readily configure any combination of blades - including multiple types of
both standard and configurable compute as well as, memory, I/O and graphics
- as their needs change. The result is a flexible, scalable and
space-efficient solution delivering price/performance* that easily eclipses
high-end servers from IBM, HP, Cray and Sun.
The Altix 4000 incorporates the very technologies and features that will
take high-performance computing (HPC) into the coming decade. The Altix 4000
tightly integrates standard implementations of Linux from Novell and Red Hat
with SGI's acclaimed visualisation and new FPGA-based SGIR Reconfigurable
Application Specific Computing (RASC(tm)) technologies. And, Altix 4000
compute blades provide socket compatibility for today's fastest IntelR
ItaniumR 2 processors and forthcoming** multi-core Itanium processors.
Space- and cost-efficient, SGI Altix 4000 servers are designed for HPC and
database users in technical, scientific and data-intensive commercial
markets, including manufacturing, life sciences, energy, research and
homeland security. With the Altix 4000, SGI is targeting markets in which
customers are looking to make the most of their technology spending budgets
while delivering breakthrough results. Already customers*** have ordered
nearly $70 million (U.S.) in SGI solutions based largely on Altix 4000
systems.
"Time-to-market, cost control, and product reliability are critical in a
world where manufacturers compete globally," said Dr. Reza Sadeghi, vice
president, product development, MSC.Software Corp. "To address these
challenges, MSC.Software in collaboration with SGI and Intel developed an
integrated solution to streamline the collaborative deployment of virtual
product development. The functionality and flexibility of the new Altix
platform greatly enhances the power of this solution, enabling MSC users to
get their products to market faster. We see tremendous potential with the
performance of the SGI Altix 4000, the new blade design, and its ability to
support various parallel computing models."
"With Altix 4000, SGI continues to drive its high-end computing leadership
into new, efficient form factors that will accelerate productivity and
reduce time-to-discovery for more customers in more markets," said Bill
Trestrail, SGI's Regional Managing Director for South Asia Pacific. "While
it's exciting enough to see what these new blade systems are capable of
addressing in today's most demanding work, the Altix 4000 makes SGI's vision
for multi-paradigm computing real."
New technologies enable multi-paradigm computing
With Altix 4000, SGI's vision for multi-paradigm computing is real. A
concept pioneered by SGI, multi-paradigm computing enables a single system
architecture to meet the needs of a wide array of applications. By uniting
previously disparate computing architectures with SGI's scalable
shared-memory architecture, the company aims to improve productivity by
creating the first supercomputers capable of supporting and combining
different computational approaches.
A key component of this is SGI's Reconfigurable Application-Specific
Computing (RASC) technology, which enables users to achieve unmatched
performance, scalability and bandwidth for data-intensive applications
critical to oil and gas exploration, defence and intelligence,
bioinformatics, medical imaging, broadcast media, and other data-dependent
industries.
By tightly integrating RASC technology within the Altix 4000 blade platform
via peer I/O technology, SGI customers can vastly improve the performance of
applications either hampered by their inability to scale or bound by slow
routines that take the majority of CPU cycles. Features like RASC will grow
ever more crucial as processor and Linux scalability reach their practical
limits. The I/O and RASC technologies will also support next-generation
performance breakthroughs in visualisation, further protecting customer
investments in SGI blade technology.
New Opportunities
Altix is a truly differentiated platform for running the full suite of SAPR
solutions, which has been certified by the SAP LinuxLab for usage on the
Intel Itanium on Linux. Today's customers demand a platform that is scalable
and flexible enough to power the real-time enterprise. They also insist on
an open standards-based infrastructure to minimise total cost of ownership.
Because of its unique system architecture, Altix can scale system resources
on demand to tackle the most advanced and demanding SAP solution-based
environments.
SGI is a new member of the SAP LinuxLab. Developers of SGI and other SAP
partners are working together at the lab to bring the best Linux experience
to the enterprise environments of customers.
To balance the performance needs and space constraints of HPC customers, SGI
designed the Altix 4000 blades as standardised units that can be deployed in
a small-footprint rack, up to 40 blades in a compact 2-foot by 3.5-foot rack
up to 160 Itanium cores for nearly 1 Teraflop of performance in only eight
square feet. And in a server market hobbled by some vendors' outdated
devotion to costly proprietary UNIXR environments, Altix 4000 continues the
SGI Altix family's support for industry-standard Linux implementations,
including Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Software and standard Red HatR
Enterprise LinuxR. Altix 4000 also supports complete data management and
visualisation solutions and is the industry's most efficient platform for
cluster applications.
SILICON GRAPHICS | The Source of Innovation and Discovery(tm)
SGI, also known as Silicon Graphics, Inc. (OTC: SGID), is a leader in
high-performance computing, visualisation 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 www.sgi.com.
-end-
This news release contains forward-looking statements regarding the sale of
products, financial and contractual commitments and SGI technologies and
third-party technologies that are subject to risks and uncertainties that
could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in such
statements. Such risks and uncertainties could include timely delivery of
hardware and software, installation and performance of hardware and
software, acceptance of hardware and software by the customer, reliance on
performance of third-party partners and other risks detailed from time to
time in the company's most recent SEC reports.
Silicon Graphics, SGI, Altix, the SGI cube and the SGI logo are registered
trademarks, and RASC, NUMAflex, NUMALink and The Source of Innovation and
Discovery are trademarks of Silicon Graphics, Inc., in the United States
and/or other countries worldwide. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus
Torvalds in several countries. Intel and Itanium are trademarks or
registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United
States and other countries. Novell is a registered trademark, and SUSE is a
trademark of Novell, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Red Hat
and all Red Hat-based trademarks are trademarks or registered trademarks of
Red Hat, Inc. in the United States and other countries. SAP and other SAP
products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are
trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several
other countries all over the world. All other trademarks mentioned herein
are the property of their respective owners.
Editors References
* Based on published performance records.
** Based on preliminary information provided by Intel Corporation.
*** Initial Altix 4000 customers include:
* SGI to Install Leading-Edge HPC
Environment for Data-Intensive Computing at Dresden Technical University
<http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2005/august/dresden
.html >
* SGI Technology to Power Germany's
National Supercomputing System Center at LRZ
<http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2004/december/lrz.h
tml>