GOVERNMENT

SAN DIEGO, CA -- SGI (NYSE: SGI), a leading provider of high-performance computing, complex data management and visualization products, solutions and services for technical and creative users, today announced the availability of the SGI(TM) high-throughput computing (HTC) environment for bioinformatics. This solution allows customers to implement a cost-effective, production-quality bioinformatics data processing resource efficiently on clusters of the new SGI(TM) Origin(TM) 300 server, which is specifically intended for technical midrange applications. For the HTC environment, SGI has developed wrappers that enable users to work with such standard bioinformatics applications as BLAST, FASTA, Clustal W and HMMER in high-throughput mode, obtaining the same results far more efficiently. These HTC wrappers are freely available from SGI. ``When evaluating the cost of a computational environment, one needs to consider the costs associated with hardware, consulting, system administration, space and power consumption,'' explained Dan Stevens, marketing manager of Life and Chemical Sciences at SGI. ``The SGI HTC environment provides customers with a remarkably competitive total cost of ownership.'' The SGI Origin 300 system utilizes IRIX®, thereby offering all the advantages of this operating system's mature, full-featured 64-bit operating system, including weightless threads, which enable scientists to fully utilize compute cycles with background tasks while interactive jobs continue to run at full speed, and Checkpoint Restart, which allows interrupted jobs to resume from intermediate checkpoints rather than the beginning, saving compute time. These and other IRIX features contribute to the much higher overall system usage and efficiencies that can be achieved with SGI Origin 300 compared to Linux® cluster solutions. SGI, which has made a long-term commitment to and has been a leader in the life sciences community for more than 15 years, delivers computational solutions for life and chemical sciences discovery research organizations in pharmaceutical, chemical, biotechnology, academic and national labs. For further details, visit www.sgi.com/solutions/sciences/chembio/, and for information about the SGI Origin 300 server, visit www.sgi.com/features/2001/oct/origin300/index.html.