OIL & GAS

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- SGI (NYSE:SGI) today announced that AstraZeneca, one of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies, has purchased SGI(R) Altix(TM) 3000 and SGI(R) Origin(R) 3000 servers and superclusters. Installed in the R&D facility at AstraZeneca's U.S. corporate headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, the systems will support simulation studies and the large computational requirements of identifying promising drug candidates. "The new 8-cpu Altix system, based on the Linux operating system and the Intel Itanium 2 processor, will support complex chemistry applications that are now becoming available on Linux platforms, and will do so with a shared memory model," explains AstraZeneca's Jim Damewood, associate director, Chemistry, Computational Chemistry & Informatics, whose department has used SGI technologies for the last 15 years. "This technology delivers the benefits of the modular Linux approach coupled with the ability to dedicate all processors to the same complex task simultaneously." The shared memory architecture of SGI Origin and Altix servers and superclusters enables all processors within a system to tackle the same problem together, while the alternative distributed computing model requires tasks to be broken up into smaller jobs to be addressed by just a subset of processors. "The Origin server upgrade, installed in June, has expanded our high-performance computing capacity to 64 processors," adds Damewood. "Data sets can be 50 to 100 gigabytes. That's an easy task for our SGI Origin and Altix systems due to their scalable, shared-memory architecture, but it can become an issue when dealing with distributed computing systems." "SGI specializes in developing and delivering targeted solutions for scientific research," says SGI's Bill Bartling, Senior Director, Market Strategy. "It's satisfying to see that AstraZeneca, one of our longest and most trusted customers, finds that its increasingly complex computing requirements are met by SGI solutions. We look forward to working with AstraZeneca for many years to come." The new SGI Origin and Altix systems, installed at the end of June, will be dedicated to lead identification and optimization efforts, critical early phases in the discovery of novel chemical entities that are suitable for use as drugs in living systems. AstraZeneca R&D Wilmington's Computational Chemistry & Informatics lab utilizes a combination of SGI high-performance computing and visualization technologies, including graphics workstations for visualization and a large-screen SGI(R) Reality Center(R) meeting room for graphical display in group settings, in addition to its SGI Origin and Altix server infrastructure. The company's R& D facilities in Sodertalje and Molndal, Sweden, have similar SGI Reality Center facilities. SGI, which 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 information, visit www.sgi.com/go/chembio, and for details about SGI's Origin and Altix servers and superclusters, visit www.sgi.com/servers/.