APPLICATIONS

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA -- SGI (NYSE: SGI ) and Computer Sciences Corporation (NYSE: CSC) today announced general access to the world's largest production single-system-image (SSI) supercomputer powered by an SGI(R) Origin(R) 3800 system with 512 processors. This system is immediately available for general-purpose, commercial, industrial and government use on a pay-per-use basis within the CSC www.e-hpc.com portal. This system, installed in September 2001, is a prime example of how SGI® Origin® family technology can be used as a distributed supercomputing resource or to power a grid computing environment and reaffirms SGI's strong leadership position on the forefront of grid computing. Grid computing is an approach by which the Internet or dedicated networks are used to interconnect a wide variety of geographically distributed computational resources, such as supercomputers, computer clusters, storage systems, and visualization systems, and present them as a single, unified resource. The grid computing concept offers access to resources irrespective of their physical location, allowing remote customers to tackle large computational problems, quickly access large bodies of data or tap into remote graphics power. Since formally launching e-HPC services at Supercomputing 2000 in Dallas, Texas, in November 2000, CSC has been growing its customer base and expanding its system capacity to meet increasing market demands. CSC harnessed the power of SGI Origin family servers to allow complex problems to be analyzed and solved while shared usage enabled costs to be minimized. Customer risks are reduced also, as no capital outlay is required. ``CSC supercomputing services offer business and science customers a viable alternative to physical testing that takes advantage of the world-class SGI Origin 3800 system by combining high availability and flexibility with reduced cost and risk,'' said John Rawlins, director of supercomputing services at CSC. ``We provide high-quality supercomputing services as a seamless network resource, with best-in-class systems that deliver maximum performance and cost-effectiveness directly to the end users.'' ``SGI brings unequalled processing power to the heterogeneous network to solve gigantic shared memory problems today,'' said Susan Tellep, director of product marketing at SGI. ``Together with providers such as CSC, SGI is making distributed, visual collaboration a reality on the grid for a broad range of customers.'' SGI pioneered the remote and distributed use of computational and visualization power and brings that expertise to grid computing. The architecture of SGI Origin family servers using the powerful SGI® IRIX® operating system brings the high-bandwidth, low-latency capacity to solve big-data problems in a manner compatible with the grid. The SGI Origin 3800 system with 512 processors and half a terabyte of memory is a highly modular computer system that can grow independently in any dimension, including processing power, memory and I/O, due to the SGI® NUMAflex(TM) design concept. For e-HPC, the SGI Origin 3800 system provides capacity-on-demand computing, allowing dynamic access to HPC solutions for the following markets and applications: Manufacturing -- rapid product development Financial services -- rapid large-scale data analysis Oil and gas -- large-scale data analysis and visualization Visualization -- ability to deliver graphics performance to the desktop via SGI® OpenGL Vizserver(TM) technology Chemicals and pharmaceuticals -- virtual product testing Genomics -- large-scale data warehousing and data analysis Science and research -- general access to easy-to-use and program HPC systems CSC e-HPC services can become a part of any organization's IT toolkit, in any of the following roles: -- Capacity-on-demand, so that customers pay only for what is needed and don't pay to buy capability to meet peak requirements -- Ability to improve job turnaround by orders of magnitude -- Business continuity and disaster recovery via storage of critical data off-site with full backup on a per-gigabyte basis -- Access to unprecedented general-purpose HPC resources with no capital outlay and reduced risk -- Benefits afforded by e-HPC's major node on the grid, which supports emerging standards -- Visualization of large data sets Visit www.csc.com or www.sgi.com for more information.