OIL & GAS

BEIJING and MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., -- SGI, a global leader in high performance computing, storage and advanced visualization and Beijing Normal University (BNU), one of the most prestigious schools in educational research and training, today introduced the BNU and SGI Bioinformatics Center. This center is an integral part of the National Base of Life Science and Technology Education initiated by the China Education Ministry, to broaden the number of students and researchers in this field for the future. The center is powered by SGI Altix 3000 supercluster running the Linux(R) operating system and utilizes products from the SGI(R) InfiniteStorage family of storage solutions that allow customers to improve their data management capabilities and capacity. This project marks the first SGI Altix system installed in China. National Bases of Life Science and Technology Education were launched by the China Education Ministry in 36 major universities and colleges in China in September 2002, to train perspective researchers in the life science field. This program is designed to increase China's number of high-caliber researchers and improve and strengthen the overall infrastructure in life sciences research with state-of-the-industry computing facilities. "The National Bases of Life Science and Technology Education will increase the speed and quality of training and education for more researchers in life sciences and keep China's research capabilities closer to that of western countries in the 21st century," said Mr. Zhong Binglin, president, BNU. "High performance computing plays an instrumental role in the process of life sciences research and SGI is an acknowledged leader in that field with supercomputers that meet the immense challenges of technical computing. We believe SGI Altix 3000 will expedite BNU's progress in life sciences research." Leveraging SGI high performance computing expertise and decades of BNU educational experience, the Bioinformatics Center will plan and implement training programs in bioinformatics to broaden the pool of well-trained and talented research professionals that will improve China's life sciences research program. SGI provides technology to compute, store and visualize research data including a SGI Altix 3000 supercluster with 16 Intel(R) Itanium(R) 2 processors, a 1TB-capacity SGI(R) InfiniteStorage TP9100 disk array and two Silicon Graphics(R) Octane2(TM) visual workstations with dual processors and SGI(R) VPro(TM) graphics. "We are pleased that Beijing Normal University, one of the top universities concentrated on training and education of life science research in China, has chosen SGI technology for their HPC needs," said Steven Lai, president, SGI China. "For more than two decades, SGI core competencies of HPC, storage, and visualization have been keenly aligned with the development of life sciences in the world and has enjoyed success in accelerating research progress, fueling innovation and discovery in many disciplines. The unique combination of SGI technology solutions and the decades of training and education experience of BNU, will ultimately lead to faster and more successful for life science research in China." SGI Altix 3000 supercluster is the first of its kind applied in life science in China. Altix systems combine SGI(R) NUMAflex(TM) architecture with Itanium 2 processors and the Linux OS. It surpasses traditional microprocessor-based servers and vector-based supercomputers in openness, efficiency and performance cost ratio. In recent benchmark tests, Altix 3000 series excelled in several areas: -- World-Record Floating-Point Performance In recent SPECfp(R)_rate_base2000 tests, a 1GHz SGI Altix 3000 system generated world-record floating-point performance for a 64-processor server with a score of 862. -- World's Fastest Memory Bandwidth Performance SGI Altix 3000 superclusters surpassed leading microprocessor-based servers on the STREAM Triad benchmark, which measures memory bandwidth performance. The 64-processor system achieved memory bandwidth of 125 GB per second on a single system image -- No. 1 in Linux I/O Performance The SGI Altix 3000 family has demonstrated sustained I/O throughput of more than 2GB per second running a single copy of Linux, an industry-leading result for Linux systems. -- Unsurpassed Scalability on Technical Applications In recent tests the SGI Altix system performed over two times faster than competitors on a broad range of application benchmarks. Applications tested across all major technical compute markets include those in computational chemistry, biosciences, environmental modeling, and computational fluid dynamics.