ENGINEERING

AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS – The Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, established in 1994 by Steven Spielberg to collect the testimonies of survivors and eyewitnesses of the Holocaust, recently purchased two SGI(TM) Origin(TM) 3400 servers to facilitate production of television/feature documentaries and interactive teaching aids. The Shoah Foundation has collected more than 50,000 testimonies from 57 countries in 32 languages, and its task now turns to cataloging more than 100,000 hours of videotaped testimony. The greater than 200,000 hours of archived videotape would take more than 13 years to view in its entirety. One of the foundation's new SGI Origin 3400 servers manages the resulting 180TB video database, and the other SGI Origin 3400 system manages all the querying to the metadata. The metadata is stored in a Sybase(R) database. The foundation is now focused on the educational use of the visual history testimonies by scholars, students and the public. The SGI Origin 3400 servers were recently used to produce a series of five foreign-language documentaries that incorporated portions of videotaped interviews from the archive of Holocaust survivor and witnesses testimonies. The films are intended for prime-time television broadcast in their respective countries of Hungary, Poland, Argentina, the Czech Republic and Russia. "The SGI Origin 3400 servers are very flexible and can be easily configured," said Sam Gustman, executive director of technology for Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. "Sybase on SGI Origin 3400 is incredibly fast, although I should add that we've had incredible performance from SGI systems from the start. The Sybase database and the SGI environment are very friendly for near real-time programming, which is what you need for delivering video and building services that run quickly. The new SGI modular brick architecture is fantastic in terms of configuration and ease of use." The key to quickly locating and retrieving the foundation's meticulously catalogued data is the revolutionary SGI(TM) NUMAflex(TM) "brick" concept. Because of this modular system structure, the user decides how much CPU, I/O, memory and disk infrastructure to add to the SGI Origin 3400 system. Every component of this scalable architecture can be upgraded, maintained or redeployed independently, so the SGI Origin 3400 system can evolve as quickly as needed. "We are extremely proud that our SGI Origin 3400 servers have been chosen to power a project of such historical importance," said Greg Estes, vice president of corporate marketing, SGI. "This purchase by Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation proves that when top-notch performance, flexibility and reliability are needed, SGI is the uncompromising choice. We are also humbly gratified to have been a part of the foundation's work from the beginning. Its message of tolerance will impact generations to come." Previous foundation documentaries, including the Academy Award(R) winning The Last Days, the Peabody and Emmy award-winning Survivors of the Holocaust and The Lost Children of Berlin utilized the SGI(TM) Challenge(R) and SGI(TM) Origin(TM) 200 servers, as well as Silicon Graphics(R) O2(R) workstations, which were donated by SGI when the foundation was established. For more information visit www.sgi.com or www.vhf.org