Silicon Graphics announced that worldwide sales of its servers and supercomputers grew 20 percent year-over-year in calendar 2004. According to IDC's recent Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, which pinpoints global server market sales growth at 6.2 percent for the same period, SGI server sales grew more than three times faster than the market. The company attributes this growth to customers increasingly choosing open standards-based SGI Altix systems based on the Linux operating system and Intel Itanium 2 processors. "We set out to rock the technical compute world with Altix and almost daily we hear how this system has enabled users to exceed their expectations," said Dave Parry, senior vice president and general manager, Server and Platform Group, SGI. "High-performance computing is clearly shifting from closed proprietary models to an open model that offers users a more interactive, versatile solution. This liberation enables them to be far more innovative and productive." Recently Japan's Institute of Solid State Physics (ISSP) and Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) joined the hundreds of demanding researchers and scientists that have turned to the Altix family of servers, clusters and supercomputers for breakthrough results in the most important challenges facing modern industrialized countries. SGI customers rely on Altix to drive new advances in a broad range of vital research, including disease control, comprehensive climate modeling, harnessing new sources of energy, and designing safer and more efficient forms of transportation. "In discussions with end users we consistently hear from the technical computing community that they need solutions that can address complex problems with increased fidelity, while decreasing simulation turnaround times," said Earl Joseph, research vice president, High-Performance Systems practice, IDC. "SGI's strategy is to develop systems that specifically address these requirements. In particular, by leveraging standard technologies and focusing its resources SGI is able to improve technical applications scope and performance." Powerful Solutions Based on Industry Standards Customers are drawn to the Altix platform for three key attributes: its ability to readily support the problem at hand, versatility that lets customers add to rather than replace the system, and performance that consistently leads the industry. These attributes have earned Altix an industry-leading performance benchmarks and groundbreaking technology achievements in its first two years including: -- 100 percent year-over-year growth in the most recent quarter ending December 2004 -- The 10,240 processor NASA Columbia system -- developed in under three months -- ranked as the world's second-fastest computer -- More than 600 customer sites and nearly 1400 systems supporting more than 40,000 Intel Itanium 2 processors -- A global shared memory architecture that delivers data across nodes of 6.4GB/sec and lowest latency at 1 microsecond -- the industry's fastest -- Consistent record industry-standard benchmarks regularly outpacing competing systems from HP, IBM, Sun and others and dominating the respected STREAM list of the 20 fastest systems in terms of memory bandwidth -- A portfolio of leading high-performance computing applications that have been certified and optimized include: -- More than 200 leading and commercially available 64-bit applications -- The wide range of applications running on Itanium 2 processors -- Leading database applications including IBM DB2 Universal Database, Oracle 10g database and Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise As the Altix platform evolves, SGI plans to drive further growth in four key areas: -- Small- to large-node cluster solutions -- Price/performance improvements with Itanium 2 family -- Industry-standard Linux operating system solutions -- Density and heating/cooling solutions