ACADEMIA

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA -- SGI (NYSE: SGI), a world leader in products, solutions and services for high-performance computing, visualization and the management of complex data, and Platform Computing Inc., the leader in distributed and grid computing software solutions, today announced a global grid computing alliance. In grid installations, SGI will work with Platform to deploy Platform grid computing solutions, including Platform LSF®, MultiCluster and Platform Globus™, with SGI® grid solutions, including the SGI® Origin® server family, the SGI® Onyx® 3000 series, SGI® Onyx® 300 visualization systems, OpenGL Vizserver™ and SGI® CXFS™. Moving forward, SGI and Platform will continue to work together to bring innovative new grid solutions that integrate data, compute and collaborative visualization resources. “This alliance builds on the success of our previous grid implementations and is a fundamental part of our grid computing strategy,” said SGI CTO Eng Lim Goh, Ph.D. “The Globus model for grid computing is based on the demand, discovery and supply of possibly varied and highly demanding services. In this model, SGI scalable shared memory and collaborative visualization systems, together with Platform’s middleware, can form the industry’s most powerful, integrated solutions to help organizations take advantage of grid computing. We are therefore eager to work with Platform’s substantial R&D team to maximize this potential.” “Platform and SGI have a long history of building Enterprise and Partner Grids with innovative organizations such as the U.S. Department of Defense, the Italian National Agency for New Technology, Energy and the Environment, and, most recently, the Stephen Hawking CosmosGrid project,” said Dr. Songnian Zhou, CTO, Platform Computing. “Platform’s grid solutions, coupled with innovative SGI HPC, visualization and data management solutions, provide integrated, grid-enabled solutions to help enterprises create higher-quality products and services and improve collaboration while maximizing IT investment.” Visual Area Networking, a concept introduced by SGI in January, enables universal access to advanced visualization on any computing device over standard networks. It allows scientists and engineers to store and process data in one place; the images visualized from this data can then be remotely accessed and manipulated by people using any client device in any location, either by themselves or collaboratively across existing networks. It puts high-performance, interactive visualization in the hands of surgeons, scientists, engineers and creative professionals, no matter where they are located in the world. The key concept underlying the development of grid computing is that users transparently take advantage of resources available over the network. SGI’s concept of visual serving unlocks the power of the grid for visualization so users anywhere can interact with the results of supercomputing calculations by greatly expanding access to scientific visualizations, thereby increasing productivity for both local and remote users. SGI pioneered the remote and distributed use of computational and visualization power and brings that expertise to grid computing.