GOVERNMENT

Dennis McKenna, the new CEO of Silicon Graphics , today confirmed the company's commitment to its existing aggressive product roadmap for the coming year. McKenna, who took over as president, CEO and chairman of the board on Jan. 31, announced that SGI will deliver new innovations and enhancements to customers throughout its server, storage and visualization product lines, along with expanded global professional services. "SGI is and will continue to play a critical role in high-performance computing," said McKenna. "This year, SGI customers should look for significant advances as we deliver powerful new solutions to solve the world's most daunting computing challenges." Server Solutions In the near future, SGI will begin shipping its new flagship product, the SGI Altix 4700, a blade-based design built on its award-winning scalable global-shared memory that provides a platform with total flexibility, fine-grained modularity, high density and excellent serviceability to support multi-paradigm computing. Later in 2006, the acclaimed SGI Altix server family will grow to include systems based on the new line of dual-core Intel Itanium 2 processors (code-named "Montecito"). With the new dual-core engine, SGI customers will be able to trigger dramatic performance increases in a broad range of new Altix systems -- from affordable mid-range configurations to large-scale supercomputer installations. Also in 2006, SGI will oversee the installation of $75 million of the world's most powerful computing systems, including the 4,096-processor supercomputer at Germany's Leibniz Computing Center and the high-performance computing environment based on SGI Altix at Dresden University of Technology. Visualization Solutions In conjunction with leading application providers, SGI will introduce solutions built around its revolutionary new Media Fusion architecture. Media Fusion exploits SGI's unique architecture to efficiently combine numerous sources of imaging data into 3D environments, creating an interactive and integrated 3D decision-making tool that helps customers make better decisions faster. In conjunction with SGI's Visual Area Networking products, Media Fusion has the potential to enhance the way organizations function and communicate globally, with dramatic implications for homeland security, energy exploration, life and environmental sciences, media, medical imaging, and manufacturing. Storage Solutions SGI customers will see new hardware offerings that significantly boost SGI's already industry-leading storage performance and price/performance. With new products across the company's entire storage RAID product line and a range of new InfiniteStorage NAS solutions, SGI will also upgrade current 2-Gigabit products to full 4-Gigabit solutions. These new, innovative offerings will enable customers to comply with new, stricter global environmental standards. Professional Services SGI's services division will further streamline delivery of pre-configured systems, such as the Altix Hybrid Cluster, which combines the power of SGI's differentiated shared memory and cost-effective commodity processors with SGI's servers, storage and visualization solutions. The company also will extend its renowned integration of immersive visualization environments with a range of new technologies, including Media Fusion solutions and Sony SXRD ultra-high resolution (4K) digital projectors.