INDUSTRY

Leveraging its position as the innovator in high-performance visual computing, SGI today announced the Silicon Graphics Prism, powerful and flexible Linux OS-based visual computer product line. For the first time, SGI has taken its most advanced computer graphics capability, previously affordable to only a select few, and made it available on a truly open and accessible platform. By combining Itanium 2 processors, the Linux operating environment, and its world renowned advanced graphics technology, SGI has created a system that is uniquely suited to addressing the world's most demanding visual computing problems -- all at price points that make it accessible to a wider group of users. The pace of scientific discovery and engineering innovation has never been more aggressive," said Paul McNamara, senior vice president and general manager, Visual Systems Group, SGI. "Silicon Graphics Prism gives a broader range of users the most advanced visualization capability available, enabling them to be more competitive in today's innovation-driven economy. By providing this capability on a Linux OS-based, open platform, more researchers and innovators will be able to leverage this leading-edge level of visual computing." Real-world applications such as cancer research, disaster preparedness, oil exploration and car safety analysis involve enormous amounts of data. Typical commodity graphics systems today must break this data into smaller chunks for graphics processing—a process that's time-consuming and imperfect. As a complete visualization system, Silicon Graphics Prism was designed to address terabyte-sized, highly complex data as a single contiguous data set in memory. Users are thereby able to quickly grasp complex relationships within their data, leading, ultimately, to deeper understanding of the issues. Because advanced visualization is integral to a host of different applications, Silicon Graphics Prism is beneficial to a wide range of markets. For example, university researchers can collaborate with distant colleagues more easily, oil exploration teams can see seismic data in much greater detail, drug discovery researchers can run proteomic simulations interactively, and emergency management personnel can model disaster scenarios. "NCSA is excited by the visual interactivity that Silicon Graphics Prism brings to supercomputing," said Rob Pennington, interim director of NCSA. "Our research collaborators include the world's leaders in their disciplines, and they are looking for new ways to understand the terabytes of data they are generating with their applications. Silicon Graphics Prism system's combination of scalable visualization, large memory and scalable computing turns researchers into active participants in their computational research rather than observers that analyze results after they are generated." "Accelerating the pace of scientific discovery requires detailed insight into terascale data-sets that is greatly enabled through the scalability, power and bandwidth of Silicon Graphics Prism," said Larry Smarr, University of California, San Diego and director, California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. "SGI's new system has the ability to deliver insight to disparate groups using Visual Area Networking which enables the kind of inter-disciplinary collaboration that will result in unique breakthroughs." Breaking Barriers for Rapid Insight With the Silicon Graphics Prism visualization family, limits are meant to be broken. Scaling up to 16 graphics pipelines and 512 processors, the Silicon Graphics Prism family offers many times the visualization capability of any currently available computing system. For leaders, innovators and visionaries, this scalability translates into the ability to interactively visualize terabytes of data in their native form without having to waste hours culling it beforehand. Instead, efforts can be focused on discovering hidden details in the dataset in order to push limits and solve previously unsolved problems. The range of problems that customers are tackling with Silicon Graphics Prism include: * unlocking the secrets of the planet * diagnosing life-threatening medical conditions in unprecedented detail * achieving six-sigma quality by enabling domain experts to work collaboratively, not sequentially * extracting currently unrecoverable petroleum assets * Simple and Easy Application Migration To greatly simplify and accelerate running applications on the new platform SGI has turned to Transitive Corporation for its QuickTransit product that allows software applications compiled for one processor and operating system to run on another processor and operating system without any source code or binary changes. With QuickTransit, researchers, scientists and engineers currently running applications on other SGI systems—based on the MIPS processor and IRIX operating system—can transparently run these applications on the new system. QuickTransit allows software developers to quickly provide a fully functional, high-performance solution on Silicon Graphics Prism, while circumventing the often lengthy and expensive process of completing a full native port.