ACADEMIA

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA -- SGI (NYSE: SGI) occupies more Top 25 spots than any other vendor in the newly released IDC Balanced Rating, designed by analyst firm IDC to rate expected sustained performance on real-world supercomputing applications. SGI is the only high-performance computing (HPC) vendor to place systems into the Top 25 of each of the six computing segments delineated by IDC. No other vendor succeeded in reaching even the Top 50 on every list. IDC developed its comprehensive, standardized rating with extensive input from the HPC community. The goal was to measure the real-life, sustained performance of working systems in the field instead of relying solely on theoretical peak performance rankings that may not translate into real application speed. IDC categorized vendors' submissions into four price bands: Departmental (less than $500,000), Divisional ($500,000 to $1 million), Enterprise (more than $1 million but designed for general high-performance workloads) and Capability (systems of unlimited price designed to tackle the world's toughest supercomputing problems). IDC further divided systems in the Enterprise and Capability segments into "single systems" and "clusters" in order to recognize the differences in the two design paths for the largest systems. SGI submitted the most powerful computer in the Single System Enterprise category. In the two Capability lists and two Enterprise lists, SGI placed more systems in No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 positions than any other vendor. The IDC Balanced Rating includes products from all companies competing in the growth-charged arena of high-performance computing. SGI's strong showing is expected to impact growth in the company's targeted HPC areas of science, manufacturing, and government and defense. "The IDC Balanced Benchmark Rating is an important step forward in recognizing that HPC customers need better and truly balanced metrics to compare system performance in a market environment that offers a multitude of different architectures, each with different performance characteristics," said Addison Snell, HPC marketing manager, SGI. "Everyone wants to measure real performance, not theoretical peaks that will never be achieved and sustained. SGI is actively working with IDC and others in the HPC community to help refine and evolve this benchmark into an industry-standard measure." "We offer congratulations to SGI, which scored very well on the IDC Balanced HPC Ranking," said Earl Joseph II, IDC research director, Worldwide Systems and Servers. "This is strong validation that SGI computers perform well across all technical computing market segments." A detailed report on IDC's methodology and the full list of 893 vendor-submitted computers are available at www.idc.com/hpc. Additional highlights of the IDC Balanced Rating include: -- SGI had 42 appearances in the Top 25 spots across the six lists. Including systems resulting from its recent acquisition of Compaq, HP had the second-best Top 25 showing with 34 systems. IBM was third with 29. -- SGI also had more Top 50 systems than any other vendor, with 69 spots across the six categories. HP was second with 68, and IBM again was third with 53. -- SGI(R) systems did exceptionally well in both the high-end Single-System Capability segment, occupying 12 of the Top 25 slots, and the midrange Departmental segment, occupying 10 of the Top 25 slots. -- Over half of the SGI systems submitted (69 out of 121, or 57%) landed in the Top 50 of their respective lists. NEC placed 54% (20 out of 37) of its submissions into the Top 50. Sun was third with 41% (38 out of 93). IBM submitted over 300 systems for ranking, far more than any other vendor, but only 17% of them reached the Top 50 of their respective lists. -- In addition to having the No. 1 position in the Single-System Enterprise category, SGI holds the No. 2 spot in the Cluster Enterprise category and both the No. 2 and No. 3 spots in the Single Capability category. No other vendor achieved four Top 3 placements across the two Capability and two Enterprise lists. For more information visit www.sgi.com.