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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - SGI (NYSE: SGI) today announced that it once again tops several computer categories in the IDC Balanced Ratings Report, featuring the latest performance ratings of high-performance computing (HPC) systems. The report, released today by IDC, ranks 1,599 HPC systems from a broad range of companies using an IDC performance metric designed to rate expected sustained performance on real-world HPC applications. The report ranks SGI® Origin™ 3000 and SGI Altix™ 3000 systems as the most powerful computers in five categories: - Enterprise class systems: single computers - Divisional class systems: overall - Divisional class systems: single computers - Divisional class systems: clusters - Departmental class systems: overall SGI also achieved the largest share of Capability class systems in the single-computer category, with the SGI Origin family accounting for 50 percent of all rated systems. In terms of overall share, SGI systems also ranked second in all three Divisional class categories – a strong showing driven in large part by the rising popularity of SGI Altix 3000 servers and superclusters, which holds two-thirds of the top 20 Divisional class systems. "Our continued leadership in several IDC Balanced Rating categories shows that SGI’s strategy to focus exclusively on the needs of HPC customers is successful and sound," said Andy Fenselau, Altix product line director, SGI. "Our strong share results in all Divisional class categories also highlight the rapidly growing market acceptance of the Altix 3000 line of Linux®-based systems. Considering today’s IDC Balanced Rating report is the first to include new SGI Altix systems, this achievement emphasized the potential of open-standards-based supercomputing that removes the compromises of small-node clusters or restrictions the of proprietary operating environments." Since its introduction in January, SGI Altix 3000 has demonstrated that Linux is ready for prime time HPC, as the first Linux cluster that scales up to 64 processors within each node and the first cluster to allow global shared-memory access across nodes. Inspired by the success and stability of the SGI Altix family and the powerful combination of standard Linux running on 64-bit Intel Itanium 2 processors, more than 70 high-performance manufacturing, science, energy and environmental applications have been ported by their commercial developers to the 64-bit Linux environment. More than two-thirds of these applications have certified and optimized their code for differentiated performance on the Altix platform.