GOVERNMENT

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA -- The New South Wales (NSW) State Rail Authority (SRA) has signed a five-year, $17 million (Australian dollars) contract with SGI (NYSE: SGI) to build a state-of-the-art virtual reality and simulation center that will enhance training and education levels for all State Rail employees. The project demonstrates the State Rail Authority's commitment to maintaining highest standards in NSW transport occupational health and safety. The State Rail Authority is the first ever rail transport network in the world to use this type of collaborative, immersive visualization technology -- eradicating the limitations posed by traditional paper-based learning methods and costly ``physical'' safety testing measures. ``The NSW rail network provides over 280 million passenger trips a year. Finding innovative ways of ensuring our staff are equipped to manage all operational situations is very important to us. SGI's technology offered us a unique and powerful way of training large groups to deal with the reality of daily operational situations, safety procedures and the uncertainty of unforeseen incidents and hazards. It will empower staff to provide the highest safety standards for customers,'' said a State Rail spokesperson. The center -- due to go live in October 2002 -- is the largest, most powerful SGI® Reality Center(TM) facility to be built in Australia to date. The two large 150 wraparound screens and world class simulators will provide a collaborative framework that will enable over 6,000 staff per year to benefit from the ``real-time'' training environment. Employees -- including train drivers, guards and station managers -- will personally experience realistic scenarios covering all aspects of driver training, platform safety, emergency procedure training, customer service and engineering maintenance. Scenarios might include incidents such as breakdowns, flooded or obstructed track situations and driving in adverse weather conditions, to dealing with a train entering a station on fire. ``SGI Reality Centers are increasingly being used across the globe with some 500 centers already in operation,'' said Bill Trestrail, Managing Director, SGI Australia and New Zealand. ``State Rail recognized the value this technology could offer in helping them meet their high service level commitments and putting measures in place to deal with the 'unpredictable.' SGI was chosen over other technology options because of the unique but proven visualization capabilities of our solutions. We are looking forward to being part of such an innovative initiative,'' he continued. As part of the deal, SGI will provide complete onsite Reality Center management and support, as well as developing the array of detailed and complex scenarios required for this training environment. The facility will include a Reality Center classroom for collaborative group training, a hazard perception unit and world class simulators. The inherent flexibility offered by SGI® technology will ensure that State Rail will be able to adapt and make improvement as new demands arise. The Reality Center screens are run from a single, high performance SGI® Onyx® 3400 system -- containing 24 processors & six graphics pipes -- making it the most powerful visualization system in Australia. The SGI Onyx 3000 series is the third-generation implementation of the revolutionary SGI® NUMA(TM) architecture. This tightly coupled architecture with inherent scaling of system and graphics bandwidth is central to the series' breakthrough visual performance.