PROCESSORS

SGI and EDS PLM Solutions, a global leader in product data management, collaboration and product design software, today announced a joint effort that will deliver breakthrough price/performance for computer-aided engineering analysis (CAE) customers worldwide. Through a new joint development and marketing relationship, SGI and EDS have optimized NX Nastran, EDS PLM Solutions' new world-class digital simulation and analysis software, for the award-winning SGI(R) Altix(TM) 3000 family of servers and superclusters. Jointly marketed as a hardware and software promotion and available starting November, 2003, the combined solution delivers dramatically new price/performance advantages for manufacturing organizations seeking to leverage the standards-based, record-shattering system performance of the SGI Altix 3000 family. The fastest system ever to run the Linux(R) operating system, SGI Altix is a true 64-bit high-performance computing (HPC) platform that leverages the advantages of open source computing with up to 64 powerful Intel(R) Itanium(R) 2 processors in a single node -- and up to 512 in a supercluster configuration with global shared memory. "Manufacturing customers worldwide rely on large model dynamic response simulation to keep their edge in an ever more competitive global marketplace," said Chuck Grindstaff, president of EDS PLM Products, a division of EDS PLM Solutions. "With NX Nastran running on the 64-bit Linux operating environment of the SGI Altix, these customers can now experience performance boosts of more than 40 percent compared to that of other Linux systems. This solution will make genuine HPC-class CAE analysis accessible to a much larger community of users." "SGI has a long history of working with the world's leading manufacturing software and solutions vendors to optimize the performance of their software on SGI's high performance computing and visualization environments," said Larry McArthur, senior director of strategic business initiatives at SGI. "Working through our joint development program, EDS PLM took maximum advantage of SGI Altix, resulting in record-setting performance for our manufacturing customers. By aggressively pricing the Altix and NX Nastran solution, SGI and EDS are providing unprecedented value and performance, while broadening the market for Altix." In September, EDS announced the addition of Nastran, the world's most widely used finite-element analysis (FEA) software, to its product lifecycle management (PLM) product suite. NX Nastran targets the growing CAE market, which analyst firm Daratech expects to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 10.3 percent through 2007. The software is widely used to digitally analyze products in industries including aerospace, automotive, electronics, medical and heavy machinery. The SGI Altix family of servers combines industry-standard 64-bit Linux with the Intel Itanium(R)2 processor family and SGI(R) NUMAflex(TM) architecture to enable global shared memory systems from a few to hundreds of processors with up to 4 terabytes of shared memory, which is a first for Linux OS-based computing. Powered by the third-generation NUMAflex supercomputing architecture, even the largest data sets can be handled and analyzed with ease and in record time for production workflows with the most demanding stability. Only the SGI Altix 3000 family of servers is designed around this scalable shared-memory architecture that analyzes data sets as whole entities, without breaking them up into smaller segments to be handled by individual processors. The Altix architecture has proven ideal both for complex shared-memory applications running on a large single system image, and for communication-intensive applications optimized for clustering in throughput workflows.