INDUSTRY

ORLANDO, FL -- SGI (NYSE: SGI) today announced the availability of SGI(R) high-throughput computing (HTC) services for chemical scientists, allowing customers to implement a cost-effective, production-quality volume-computing environment efficiently on either a single SGI(R) IRIX(R) system or a cluster of such systems. These services augment SGI HTC bioinformatics solutions announced in 2001, covering such applications as BLAST, FASTA, ClustalW and HMMER. For these HTC solutions, SGI develops driver programs that enable life and chemical scientists to run important applications in high-throughput modes. These drivers work with native applications and allow users to obtain the same results far more efficiently. ``Applications for quantum mechanics and molecular docking experiments have elements that are well suited for high-throughput computing models,'' explained SGI Life and Chemical Sciences Market Manager Juli Nash Moultray, Ph.D. ``For example, large quantum mechanical calculations once were the exclusive domain of traditional supercomputers, but today's chemists are demanding faster turnaround as well as faster throughput to address the large size and volume of problems they are facing. SGI HTC services for chemists provides precisely these advantages.'' The future trend, she points out, will be minimizing turnaround times and maximizing throughput rates of critical chemistry applications simultaneously. Traditional throughput applications, such as those used for docking and database searches, are ideal for this approach, as are molecular dynamics and quantum mechanics applications. For example, Gaussian® 98, a connected system of programs for performing a variety of molecular orbital quantum mechanical calculations, can be used to carry out fundamental research on a very large set of small-sized problems. SGI high-throughput computing services facilitate and optimize these types of large-scale calculations. SGI® Origin® 300 and SGI® Origin® 3000 series server systems utilize IRIX (as a single-system image and/or as a cluster), thereby offering all the advantages of this operating system's mature, full-featured 64-bit operating system. These include 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 instead of 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 servers 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. Visit www.sgi.com for further information.