INDUSTRY

Silicon Graphics announced its role as Gold Sponsor of the first Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), to be held March 16-17 in San Francisco. Private industry, universities and government research labs in the U.S. and around the world are using Linux(R) operating system for 21st century science, driving an ever increasing pace of innovation in the earth sciences, astrophysics, physics, chemistry, and bioinformatics. In his presentation, "Linux at the Core of HPC Applications for a Strategic Advantage," scheduled for March 16, Dave Parry, SGI Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Server and Platform Group, will discuss the importance of open standards as a driving force to accelerate innovation. OSBC 2004 will explore the financial impact of open source software on global business. It is the first forum to not only examine the role of open source in shaping the future of embedded, server, and desktop markets, but also to explore new opportunities that open source presents for both startup and established technology vendors, and how to capitalize on them. Keynote presentations, panel sessions and speakers from some of the world's leaders in business, law, venture capital and technology will address the attending venture capitalists, attorneys, and CEOs. "OSBC 2004 is the first event that gathers together leading vendors, investors and enterprise customers to talk about how they can make money on Open Source," said Matt Asay, founder of The Open Source Business Conference. "SGI has been a pioneer in bringing Open Source into mission-critical, enterprise markets to deliver-performance and cost-effective solutions for their customers. We're excited to have them participating as a sponsor and a featured speaker." As a leader in the Open Source community, SGI is the only high-performance computing vendor dedicated to open source software. SGI's award-winning SGI(R) Altix(R) family of servers and superclusters is based on a 64-bit open-source Linux operating environment that leverages the combined power of Intel(R) Itanium(R) 2 processors with SGI(R) NUMAflex(TM) shared-memory architecture. Since its introduction at LinuxWorld last year, SGI Altix has consistently shattered scalability and performance records on high-performance computing industry-standard benchmarks, scaling to hundreds of processors in a single Linux system image and thousands more via clustering. Parry, who will address the OSBC on March 16, at 10:15 a.m., notes, "Linux has not just grown into the commercial enterprise 32-bit marketplace, negatively impacting Microsoft's Windows NT marketshare. Linux has also has grown into the 64-bit high performance computing market, and is eating into the marketshare held by proprietary UNIX systems such as IBM AIX, HP HP-UX, and Sun Solaris. With rapid adoption for high performance computing solutions, Linux is a driving force in dramatically accelerating innovation in a variety of technical and creative markets including government and defense, life sciences, manufacturing, research and development, energy, and media. OSBC attendees will learn how the HPC marketplace is using SGI Altix platforms to innovate, create, and understand their world better, faster, and more cost effectively." Silicon Graphics has been a long-time contributor to the Linux community. Over the past five years, SGI has offered key graphics technologies to the open source community, including Open Inventor(TM), an industry leading visualization scene graph, an OpenGL(R) sample implementation, and the key components for the OpenML(R) standard. In addition, SGI has provided many core server and system technologies to the Linux community for high-performance computing and storage, such as the highly valued XFS(R) journaled file system. The entire SGI(R) InfiniteStorage product line for storage consolidation, data lifecycle management, data sharing and protection is now available for SGI Altix environments, allowing instant data access among heterogeneous platforms, as well as the performance and scalability features of open source XFS and SGI(R) InfiniteStorage Shared Filesystem CXFS(TM) software.