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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- World's Most Scalable Linux System Sweeps Array of Industry-Standard Benchmarks with Twice the Performance of Competitive Offerings -- SGI today announced that its SGI Altix 3000 servers and superclusters continue to deliver record performance on the next-generation Intel Itanium 2 processors (1.30 GHz with 3M L3 cache, and 1.50 GHz with 6M L3 cache, code-named Madison). In a series of high-performance compute (HPC) benchmarks, the SGI Altix 3000 family outperformed competing systems including IBM and HP, demonstrating a significant advantage in performance and scalability for systems ranging from 4 to 64*and even 128*processors. The results confirm that the SGI Altix 3000 system, driving a 64-bit Linux operating environment, maintains its performance edge over competing architectures, including scalable SMP and small-node clusters. "Tests run on Altix 3000 have consistently resulted in near-linear performance gains as applications are scaled to 128 processors," said Dave Parry, senior vice president and general manager, Server and Platform Group, SGI. "This means that SGI customers will extract the maximum benefit from their Altix system, no matter how many processors or how much memory their problem sets demand. Only SGI's expertise and commitment to HPC users can deliver such Linux and Intel Itanium 2-based solutions to solve customers' most complex, big-data problems." In an extensive array of industry-standard benchmarks such as SPEC®, STREAM Triad and Linpack, as well as on real-world scientific and engineering applications, the SGI Altix 3000 family bested similarly configured systems from IBM, HP and Sun-in some cases delivering more than two times the performance over the nearest competitor. The tests affirm that SGI Altix 3000 systems deliver world-record performance on an open-standards-based platform, with the industry-leading price-performance advantage that only a standards-based solution can provide. Details of these tests are documented in "SGI Altix 3000 Benchmark Results: June 2003" which is available at www.sgi.com./newsroom. Three of the most interesting results based on industry-standard measurements are: - SPECfp®_rate_base2000 benchmark: a 64-processor Altix system proved a stunning 3.94 times faster than HP Superdome(tm) and 1.95 times faster than the Sun® Fire(tm) 15K; - STREAM Triad: exceeded 127GB per second-a 4.7 times improvement over the performance of HP Superdome system; and - Linpack NxN: The Altix system performed 1.46 times faster than IBM p690 and 2.22 times faster than HP Superdome. The company attributes these leading results to the unique combination of its global shared memory SGI® NUMAflex(tm) architecture, the 64-bit Linux operating environment and the Intel Itanium 2 processor family. Inspired by the success of the SGI Altix family and this powerful combination, more than 50 high-performance manufacturing, science, energy and environmental applications have been ported by their commercial developers to the 64-bit Linux environment, over half of which have certified and optimized their code for differentiated performance on the Altix platform. "The Altix 3000 system's blazing performance doesn't stop with industry benchmarks," added Parry. "It extends the system's dominance with equally impressive performance on running real-world 64-bit applications." The SGI Altix system also performed over two times faster than competitors on a broad range of application benchmarks. Applications tested across all major technical compute markets include those in computational chemistry, biosciences, environmental modeling, and computational fluid dynamics. Highlights on application testing include achieving a 2.25 times performance improvement over a 32-processor IBM p690 TURBO running Gaussian on the Altix system. MM5, from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, ran 1.76 times faster than the nearest competitor, the IBMp690. Other applications tested by SGI include BLAST® and NWChem. In January, SGI announced the SGI Altix 3000 family of servers and superclusters, which combine SGI® supercomputing architecture with Intel Itanium 2 processors and the Linux operating system. SGI Altix 3000 is recognized 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. Competitive benchmark results stated above reflect results published on www.spec.org as of June 17, 2003. The comparison presented above is based on the best performing 64-cpu, 32-cpu and 16-cpu servers currently shipping by IBM, HP and Sun. For the latest SPECfp_rate_base2000 benchmark results, visit http://www.spec.org/cpu2000 Applications Tested: - BLAST® (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) application from the National Center of Biotechnology Information, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ - Gaussian®, an advanced technical application that allows scientists to predict energies, molecular structures, and vibrational frequencies, http://www.gaussian.com - NWChem computational chemistry application developed at the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL), part of the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, http://www.emsl.pnl.gov:2080/docs/nwchem/nwchem.html siosi6 LDA DFT energy - MM5, modeling system from the National Center for Atmospheric Research http://www.mmm.ucar.edu/mm5/mm5-home.html