SGI's Third Quarter of Fiscal 2006 Ushers in New Leadership, Key Products and Alliances, and Major Wins
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (May 30, 2006)—As Silicon Graphics, Inc. (OTC: SGIDE) entered an era of accelerated innovation under new leadership in the third quarter for its Fiscal Year 2006, the company racked up significant customer wins in an array of markets worldwide, while introducing groundbreaking products and forging important new channel alliances.
Leadership
In January, Dennis McKenna was named SGI's new chairman of the board, chief executive officer and president, replacing Bob Bishop, who will continue to serve as vice chairman. McKenna immediately confirmed the company's commitment to its existing aggressive product roadmap for 2006 by announcing that SGI will deliver new innovations and enhancements to customers throughout its server, storage and visualization product lines, along with expanded global professional services.
In March, the company announced a major reorganization aimed at cutting operational costs, along with product realignments that include consolidating compute and visualization solutions. The changes are expected to result in stronger differentiation of product lines and a flattened and more competitive organization.
Products and Solutions
SGI introduced the new SGI® RASC™ RC100 computation blade, a groundbreaking solution that packs the power of dozens of supercomputer nodes into a single blade by leveraging the inherent parallelism of the industry's most powerful Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology. Built with dual Xilinx Virtex™ 4 FPGAs, SGI RASC RC100 Blade can accelerate the performance of many HPC applications by orders of magnitude over conventional systems at a far lower cost and much smaller footprint. Based on SGI's groundbreaking RASC (Reconfigurable Application-Specific Computing) technology, the new RC100 blade is designed for use with award-winning SGI® Altix® servers, and can be programmed at the customer's site to accelerate mission-critical, high-performance computing (HPC) applications in oil and gas exploration, defense and intelligence, bioinformatics, medical imaging, and broadcast media.
SGI also announced that SAP® solutions are now certified, supported and available on the award-winning SGI Altix server platform for Linux® environments. The certification means that both new and existing SAP customers can leverage the same scalable and high-throughput SGI® servers already adopted by many of the world's leading automakers, energy giants, pharmaceutical companies, and manufacturers. With Altix driving their Linux enterprise infrastructures, SAP customers can more easily and affordably consolidate their resources to reduce ownership costs. In a related announcement, SGI named REALTECH AG a certified SAP migration partner for SGI platforms. Based in Germany, REALTECH is a leading technology consulting and software firm.
Channel Programs
Also this quarter, SGI and GTSI Corp. (NASDAQ: GTSI) announced an agreement establishing GTSI as a front line government channels supplier providing SGI solutions to federal, state and local government customers. The alliance ensures SGI and its strategic resellers easy access to GTSI's numerous resources, including its existing government contracts and buying vehicles, its extensive government sales administrative expertise, and its broad knowledge of government customer requirements. The new relationship is a joint effort to grow revenues from the sale of 64-bit Linux solutions to government agencies at all levels.
Industry Awards
Bio-IT World editors also selected SGI as one of 50 companies that have driven and continue to drive the future of biomedical research and drug discovery. The Bio-IT 50, published in the March issue of Bio-IT World, identifies top sciences firms that provide the most indispensable and enabling technologies to the life sciences field. SGI customers are among the "who's who" in the life sciences field. They include Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center's (MSKCC) Computational Biology Center, Merck, Bristol-Meyers Squibb, AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals, and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), which received the Bio-IT World Best Practices Award for Data and Image Analysis using SGI systems in July 2005.
Customers
SGI's third fiscal quarter saw major customer wins throughout the world and across all key industries. A select sampling of these includes:
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ADRIN, part of India's Department of Space, in an effort to increase the throughput and streamline the workflow management associated with ever-increasing satellite data through Oracle10g, purchased a series of SGI® Altix® 350 mid-range servers and a 16TB SGI® InfiniteStorage Storage Area Network solution. ADRIN will use these systems to run its in-house developed applications to process satellite image data on 24x7 mode to serve its users. SGI® InfiniteStorage Shared Filesystem CXFS™ on a three-tiered Hierarchical Storage Management Solution built from SGI® InfiniteStorage arrays and third-party tape backup systems is used to manage the huge data archives. ADRIN leverages nearly a dozen Altix 350 servers that form a GRID across five sites throughout India and work in conjunction to not only increase throughput but also to provide 24x7 access to ADRIN clients. Each site is powered with primary and backup servers and three-tier HSM to run application software, while a dedicated system manages the back-end Oracle 10g database.
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The Brazilian facility of German engineering giant Behr, in an effort to improve product quality and speed time to market, purchased a Linux® OS-based SGI® visualization solution to run a range of computer-aided engineering and finite element analysis applications, including PERMAS and CATIA. The four-processor, 24GB SGI® system runs Novell's SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server, Ver. 9 with SGI ProPack 4. Running QuickTransit™ from Transitive Corporation to enable highly optimized application performance within a 64-bit Linux environment, Behr's Engineering Department selected the SGI solution because of its industry-leading global shared-memory architecture, the power and scalability of Intel Itanium 2 processors, and native support for Linux.
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EFILM LLC, a major digital film laboratory in Hollywood, Calif., and a long-time customer of Silicon Graphics, has purchased a large complement of SGI technology to support its exploding Digital Laboratory business. EFILM purchased an SGI® InfiniteStorage RM660 system to add three real-time data streams to an SGI CXFS shared filesystem SAN. EFILM also purchased 61TB of SGI® InfiniteStorage TP9700 SATA storage, a Brocade® SilkWorm® 48000 Director for Fibre Channel connectivity, a top-of-the-line StorageTek® SL8500 tape library with a petabyte (PB) of storage, and an SGI Altix 350 server system with eight Intel Itanium 2 processors to be used as a tape server. EFILM also has an Altix 350 and two Altix 330 servers for R&D, a 64-processor SGI® Altix® 3700 Bx2 server for rendering and image processing and hundreds of terabytes of SGI InfiniteStorage.
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GeoEye, the world's largest commercial remote sensing company, purchased four, 16-processor SGI Altix 350 servers for use at the GeoEye ground site in Dulles, Va. The new Altix systems will drive core satellite image processing for GeoEye-1, the company's new satellite scheduled for launch in February of 2007. With the capacity to collect more than 700,000 square kilometers of high-resolution imagery every day, GeoEye-1 will produce record amounts of image data, which was a key reason the company selected the Altix platform. With a powerful shared-memory architecture and independently scalable I/O, Altix 350 servers will allow GeoEye to process data generated by the new satellite, while GeoEye's choice to run Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Ver. 9 ensures the Altix deployment dovetails with existing GeoEye applications. Also essential to the purchase decision was the 64-bit Intel Itanium 2 processor's ability to accommodate large files and large-scale memory requirements, in addition to HPC-class mutli-threading. Once operational in April 2007, GeoEye-1 will be the world's highest resolution commercial earth imaging system with a ground resolution of .41-meter panchromatic and 1.65-meter multispectral. It will be the fourth remote-sensing satellite in the GeoEye constellation.
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Janimation, a creative animation, visual effects and design studio in Dallas, Texas, purchased a complete SGI® InfiniteStorage NAS Gateway system for their work in feature films, commercials and video game design. SGI NAS Gateway enables them to use their existing storage systems with InfiniteStorage NAS allowing them to leverage the investment they have already made in existing storage systems. Janimation performed extensive research before testing and purchasing the SGI system, and they are already reporting greatly enhanced workflow and performance due to the speed and throughout of the SGI NAS system.
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NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. added 600TB of SGI® InfiniteStorage 6700 storage to its Columbia supercomputer deployment, and acquired a new 4Gbit infrastructure to optimize data management with SGI InfiniteStorage Shared Filesystem CXFS. Rated No. 4 on the Top 500 list of the world's most powerful computers, NASA's 10,240-processor Columbia system required additional storage capacity to accommodate the massive data management, access and retrieval demands of its broad user base. The purchase also included on-site support from SGI's Professional Services staff.
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To accommodate the need for greater bandwidth performance prompted by the growing demand for 4K digital intermediates by the motion picture industry, Pacific Title & Art Studio purchased two SGI InfiniteStorage 6700 systems with 50TB storage. A leading film optical house since 1919, Pacific Title generates 8 to 16TB of data per day in 2K and 4K digital cinema mastering. The SGI InfiniteStorage 6700 systems, with real-time streams of 3 GBps, were selected to meet the needs of real-time 4K-which generates data rates in excess of 850MBps-as well as for the 4Gbit Fibre Channel architecture, which the facility plans to implement throughout its two locations in Hollywood, Calif.
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The Royal Dutch Meteorological Society (KNMI) extended its existing data processing deployment for weather forecasting, climate research and seismology with a new 224-processor SGI Altix 3700 Bx2 supercomputer with 448GB of memory, a 16-processor, 32GB Altix 3700 Bx2 system to serve as a "head node," and a 6TB SGI® InfiniteStorage TP9500 array. With the new SGI compute and data management solutions, KNMI will dramatically upgrade its ability to achieve highly accurate and reliable forecasts and trend analyses. KNMI selected the SGI solutions over competing products due to SGI's leading price/performance and uniquely powerful system architecture.
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Saad Hospital, a leading multi-specialty hospital in Saudi Arabia, has purchased a cluster of four, 16-processor SGI Altix 350 mid-range servers, with a total of 64GB of RAM, to handle the increasing load of radiology images transferred between hospital departments. Each group of two servers will back up the other, to ensure 24x7availability for hospital staff. Purchased through SGI reseller Saad Trading, the systems run Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Ver. 9 and the SGI Advanced Linux™ Environment with SGI ProPack™. Saad Hospital selected SGI Altix due to the Altix platform's high reliability and its powerful shared-memory architecture, which will allow the hospital to accommodate the growing demands of its Picture Archive and Communication System.
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Team McLaren Mercedes Formula 1 Team has further strengthened its technical relationship with SGI's acclaimed HPC technology in the McLaren Technology Centre in Woking, England, with new solutions capable of analyzing increasingly larger Formula 1 race car models. To help McLaren engineers assess specific new car designs, the company has installed a 128-processor SGI® Altix® 4700 blade server configuration with 512GB of memory, and another 32-processor Altix 4700 blade system with 192GB of memory. While the larger system will drive most of the more complex computational fluid dynamics (CFD) problems, the smaller 32-processor system will handle pre- and post-processing tasks.
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The Theoretical and Polymer Physics (PFY) group of the Department of Applied Physics at the Technical University of Eindhoven (TU/e) in The Netherlands will support leading-edge physics research with a new 16-processor, 64GB SGI® Altix® 330 mid-range server running Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Ver. 9. In the PFY group, theoretical research is carried out on polymers and organic materials. Researchers are working to understand the relationship between the molecular and microstructure of materials, the microscopic physical processes bringing about these structures, and the resulting material properties - in short: the structure-dynamics-property relation. Methods from various areas of theoretical physics are used: statistical and soft-matter physics, solid-state quantum theory, and large-scale computer simulations. The group closely collaborates with other groups of the department as well as polymer chemists, material scientists and computer scientists from the departments of Chemical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Mathematics and Computing Science. An important part of the research is embedded in the Eindhoven Polymer Laboratories and Dutch Polymer Institute. A long-time relationship with SGI, the price/performance leadership of SGI Altix 330 systems, and a desire to optimize performance with Intel compilers led to the sale.
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The University of Colorado at Boulder, to support studies involving the High Resolution Dynamics Limb Sounder (HIRDLS) project, purchased an 80-processor SGI Altix 3700 Bx2 system with 160GB of memory. HIRDLS focuses on scientific investigation of the Earth's atmosphere; in particular, climatically vital regions linking the planet's lower and upper atmospheric regions. CU-Boulder purchased the SGI Altix system, which runs Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Ver. 9, to run customized HIRDLS code that analyzes data captured from a spacecraft, which ultimately is converted to such atmospheric quantities as temperature, ozone, water vapor, nitrogen dioxide and aerosols. Working with SGI reseller James River Technical Inc., CU-Boulder selected the SGI Altix system because of its superior price/performance over systems based on dual-core Opteron processors, and because of the system enables CU-Boulder researchers to process more data faster.
SILICON GRAPHICS | The Source of Innovation and Discovery™
SGI, also known as Silicon Graphics, Inc. (OTC: SGIDE), is a leader in high-performance computing. SGI helps customers solve their computing challenges, whether it's sharing images to aid in brain surgery, finding oil more efficiently, studying global climate, providing technologies for homeland security and defense, enabling the transition from analog to digital broadcasting, or helping enterprises manage large data. With offices worldwide, the company is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., and can be found on the Web at www.sgi.com.
Silicon Graphics, SGI, Altix, XFS, the SGI cube and the SGI logo are registered trademarks, and CXFS, SGI ProPack, NUMAlink and The Source of Innovation and Discovery are trademarks of Silicon Graphics, Inc., in the United States and/or other countries worldwide. SGI Linux and SGI Advanced Linux 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. Novell is a registered trademark, and SUSE is a trademark of Novell, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Intel and Itanium are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. UNIX a registered trademark of The Open Group in the U.S. and other countries. QuickTransit is a trademark of Transitive Corporation and/or its affiliates in the United States and other countries. Brocade, the Brocade and SilkWorm are registered trademarks of Brocade Communications Systems, Inc., in the United States and/or in other countries. All other trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.
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