GOVERNMENT

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA -- A 512-processor SGI® Origin® 3800 supercomputer at the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center Major Shared Resource Center (ERDC MSRC), Vicksburg, Miss., is helping the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers better understand the structural effects of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the Pentagon. Using this supercomputer from SGI (NYSE: SGI), the Corps of Engineers is studying how to make safer, more bomb-resistant buildings. By studying the Sept. 11 Pentagon attack and other terrorist attacks, including the Marine barracks bombing in Lebanon, the Oklahoma City bombing and the attacks on the Khobar Towers barracks in Saudi Arabia and the U.S. embassies in east Africa, the Corps of Engineers has been able to create new, safer building materials. Flying debris such as glass shrapnel is often the cause of casualties in these kinds of attacks, and the Corps of Engineers is working to design structures that will better protect against this problem. The SGI Origin 3800 supercomputer at ERDC MSRC can recreate a blast wave and predict the path of every shard of glass from a single breaking window. These kinds of studies have helped create a new type of window that can stand up to tremendous force and save lives. Just prior to Sept. 11, a renovated section of the Pentagon had been fitted with blast-resistant windows designed in part by running blast simulations on the SGI® supercomputer. Neither the heat nor the force of the airplane crashing into the Pentagon was able to shatter the new windows, reducing the number of deadly shards of glass. ``SGI has spearheaded the development of supercomputing technology that makes possible these kinds of incredibly complex and demanding blast simulations,'' said Bob Bishop, chairman and CEO, SGI. ``We have pioneered the single-system shared memory architecture in which all processors share a supercomputer's memory as if it were a single entity, significantly improving performance over clustered computer architectures.'' ``With the industry's most advanced NUMA architecture, a customer can configure an SGI Origin 3800 system up to a single 1,024-processor shared memory system,'' Bishop said. ``This is a huge advantage for SGI over its competitors, none of which have achieved this level of scalability for any of their systems, whether ccNUMA, bus based or cross-bar based. This allows unique SGI NUMAflex systems to provide industry-leading performance for both MPI and large shared-memory applications.'' ERDC MSRC's SGI Origin 3800 system is configured with 512 MIPS® R12000(TM) 400 MHz processors, 410 GFLOPS of computational capacity, 512GB of aggregate memory size and 4TB of hardware disk storage. This single-system image consists of 512 processors attached to shared memory and an input/output subsystem, all of which are connected by the robust SGI® IRIX® operating system. ERDC MSRC, which is funded by the Department of Defense (DoD) High Performance Computing Modernization Program, is the premier research and development laboratory for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. It specializes in five DoD-designated computational technology areas: computational structural mechanics, computational fluid dynamics, climate/weather/ocean modeling and simulation, forces modeling and simulation, and environmental quality modeling and simulation. For more information visit www.sgi.com