PROCESSORS

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Silicon Graphics (NYSE:SGI) recently completed the first quarter of its fiscal year 2004 with the strongest product portfolio it's had in years and with key sales wins across its target markets. The company has a complete new line of competitive products not available a year ago, including its award-winning, benchmark-breaking SGI(R) Altix(TM) 3000 family of servers and superclusters. New products introduced in the first quarter were the newly branded SGI(R) InfiniteStorage family of products and a whole new line of visualization products -- the Silicon Graphics(R) Onyx4(TM) UltimateVision(TM) system and Silicon Graphics(R) Tezro(TM) visual workstation -- which are causing a stir in the technical and creative marketplaces. The company posted several key sales wins in its five target markets: government and defense, sciences, manufacturing, energy and media. The SGI Altix 3000 family of servers and superclusters, based on Intel(R) Itanium(R) 2 processors, continues to be recognized by the community and customers as a new model for Linux(R) computing. In July, the Altix system was named "Product of the Year" by Linux Journal and the company continues to increase the number of CPUs in a single shared-memory Altix system. This quarter marked the first 128-processor beta customer as sales of the SGI Altix 3000 family continued to gain momentum. Among this quarter's wins were the following: -- The Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), Washington, D.C., is the company's first customer to install a 128-processor single system image SGI Altix 3000 supercomputer. The record-setting system will help military and civilian researchers push the boundaries of Linux applications to solve some of the world's most challenging computational problems. The enormous processing power and speed of this shared-memory SGI Altix supercomputer gives NRL researchers the opportunity to load an entire data set into memory simultaneously. In this single system image architecture, every memory module can be shared among all 128 processors in the configuration, maximizing the efficient use of the supercomputer's available memory, all the time. NRL will use the power of the Altix system for very demanding high-performance computing applications including computational fluid dynamics, ocean and weather modeling, and computational physics. -- The United States Government acquired two, 64-processor SGI Altix 3000 systems. Each system features 512GB of memory. The United States Government also purchased an SGI(R) InfiniteStorage TP9500 RAID array with 40 Terabytes of storage, along with SGI(R) InfiniteStorage Shared Filesystem CXFS(TM), and SGI(R) InfiniteStorage Data Migration Facility software. The system was chosen for its price/performance, scalability, large shared-memory architecture, and performance. -- As part of its ongoing effort to ensure safe transportation and storage of nuclear materials, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission purchased an SGI Altix 3000 system powered by 12 Intel Itanium 2 processors and 96GB of system memory. The NRC acquired the system for use in its Spent Fuel Project Office in the Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards. Running such advanced non-linear structural simulation and finite element analysis applications as ANSYS(R) and LS-DYNA(TM), the NRC will depend on its new Altix system for thermal and structural analysis of spent nuclear fuel transportation and storage casks. -- Physical chemistry researchers at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, now have a powerful new discovery engine for their quest to calculate molecular energies. Wesleyan recently purchased a four-processor SGI Altix 3000 system with 16GB of memory to help researchers develop new methods for computational thermochemistry, and to predict the absolute rates of chemical reactions. To accomplish this, Wesleyan leveraged extensions within the Altix system's 64-bit Linux operating system to stripe their scratch files across eight, 15,000 RPM disks using two ultra SCSI 3 controllers, thereby attaining 16 times the I/O speed of a typical 7,500 RPM disk. By combining the system's four Intel Itanium 2 processors, the high-speed striped I/O, and 16GB of shared memory leveraging the high-speed Altix memory bus, Wesleyan's individual research groups report they now have access to performance that was previously only available at regional supercomputer centers. Also in the first quarter, the company announced the newly branded SGI InfiniteStorage family with new versions of product offerings. With more than 400 customers since its introduction in 1999, SGI InfiniteStorage Shared Filesystem CXFS provides industry-leading heterogeneous shared file access over a storage area network and now supports Linux and IBM(R) AIX(R) in addition to current support for IRIX(R), Solaris(TM) and Windows(R) platforms, with support for Mac OS(R) X later this year. SGI InfiniteStorage Data Migration Facility data lifecycle management software supports multiple tiers of storage including online disk, near-line disk and tape extending to petabytes seamlessly and cost-effectively. These capabilities are integrated into new SGI(R) InfiniteStorage NAS 2000, SGI(R) InfiniteStorage SAN 2000, and SGI(R) InfiniteStorage SAN 3000 solutions. SGI announced a series of new InfiniteStorage alliances including: -- An OEM reseller agreement with AppIQ in which SGI will OEM components of AppIQ's standards-based SAN management technology. SGI will also market AppIQ's complete enterprise solution suite to provide support for heterogeneous operating systems and storage environments. -- Discreet and SGI are qualifying key elements of the SGI InfiniteStorage solution, including the SGI SAN Server(TM) family and SGI(R) CXFS(TM) shared filesystem, to work with Discreet's systems and software product lines, as part of the Discreet(R) sparks(R) infrastructure program. The agreement also encompasses global co-marketing and sales of the SGI InfiniteStorage solution. Discreet, working with SGI, will resell SGI SAN solutions worldwide as an integral part of its high-performance infrastructure products designed to target a growing demand for robust, highly scalable shared storage environments. -- Quantel and SGI will build on their pioneering work at Peter Jackson's The Film Unit by working together to qualify elements of the SGI InfiniteStorage SAN solution to work with iQ and other generationQ systems. Illustrating the impressive openness of both systems, the Quantel(R) iQ Resolution Co-existent(TM) finishing system has been integrated with SGI CXFS shared filesystem for SAN at The Film Unit. The result is an ultrafast, highly productive environment for Digital Intermediate (DI) color correction that eliminates transfer bottlenecks and makes the process more creative and flexible. The two companies expect to roll out the DI system worldwide in the near future. Among the SGI InfiniteStorage wins this quarter were: -- Pacific Title & Art Studio recently purchased two SGI InfiniteStorage TP9500 storage arrays and an SGI Origin 300 server, with a total of approximately 30TB of disk as the company expands into digital intermediates, and to provide the throughput needed for high-speed film (data) transfers. SGI InfiniteStorage SAN links the various SGI(R) visual workstations, numerous Macintosh(R) workstations, 30 Macintosh render nodes, 50 Linux render nodes, a Silicon Graphics(R) Onyx(R) 3200 system and five 8-processor SGI(R) Origin(R) 2000 servers in the company' Hollywood and West Hollywood facilities. Pacific Title also purchased the SGI InfiniteStorage CXFS environment to support digital scanning and recording on two very high-speed -- 2K to 6K resolution -- Northlight film scanners, manufactured by FilmLight in the UK. Pacific Title is using up to 6K resolution for long-term digital master archiving, which requires an enormous amount of storage and compute power. Pacific Title has recently utilized SGI InfiniteStorage SAN with CXFS on a number of major motion pictures including The Matrix Reloaded, Seabiscuit, Charlie's Angels II, The Cat in the Hat, Fast & Furious2, and Matrix: Revolutions. -- At the Aeronautical Systems Center Major Shared Resource Center (ASC MSRC) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, OH, SGI installed the largest Origin(R) 3900 system ever built with 2,048 processors. The configuration consisted of four MIPS(R) 512-processor single system image based on the IRIX(R) operating system, tied together with 40TB of SGI InfiniteStorage. The SGI(R) Origin(R) supercomputer more than doubles the available computing capacity of the ASC MSRC in both raw computing capacity and hours available to researchers. The first quarter also marked the launch of Silicon Graphics Onyx4 UltimateVision, the fourth generation of the most successful visualization system in its class, which starts at $45,000 -- one-fifth the price and eight times the performance of previous Onyx(R) systems. At this level of affordability, the new Onyx4 UltimateVision system brings highly-advanced visual computing within the reach of individuals and small design and engineering teams. Onyx4 features a completely new graphics architecture based on a combination of industry-standard graphics boards along with SGI developed hardware and software -- scaling up to 32 graphics pipelines and 64 processors. Among the first Onyx4 UltimateVision customers were: -- U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory, N.M., purchased a Onyx4 system to help ensure the continued safety, reliability and performance of America's nuclear stockpile without underground testing. The 80-processor, 34-pipe Onyx4 UltimateVision system, offers many times the visualization capability of any other computing system available making it the only system able to interactively visualize the most complex data sets. Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) will use the Onyx4 UltimateVision system as part of the Department of Energy's Stockpile Stewardship Program, a key component of which is the Advanced Simulation and Computing Initiative (ASCI), designed to accelerate the development of the computational power DOE scientists and engineers to meet the demanding visualization needs of virtual testing. -- Army's Tank, Automotive Research Development and Engineering Center (TARDEC), a U.S. Army research, development and engineering center located in Warren, MI conducting critical performance modeling, simulation and analysis of military ground vehicle materiel, has upgraded its SGI HPC computation and visualization infrastructure with the addition of a new Onyx4 UltimateVision supercomputer. John Schmuhl, Associate Director for High Performance Computing at TARDEC, said only SGI meets the center's intensive HPC-class computational and visualization needs. TARDEC engineers feed vehicle design characteristics -- such as center of gravity, weight, spring rates, and inertial properties -- into simulation software running on Onyx4. The vehicles are then run through their paces -- in real time in tandem with manned motion base simulators -- with Onyx4 showing how the vehicles handle difficult terrains, high speeds, sharp turns and other stressful conditions. Along with Onyx4, TARDEC also acquired the following systems: SGI(R) Onyx(R) 3900, SGI(R) Onyx(R) 350 and eight-processor SGI(R) Altix(TM) 3300. -- SARA -- Computing and Networking Services, the Dutch National HPC and Networking Center -- has added an Onyx4 UltimateVision system to its existing array of SGI visualization and computational systems. The 20-processor, eight graphics pipes Onyx4 is a powerful complement to the work of Dutch scientists and engineers pursuing a wide range of compute-, data- and visualization-intensive disciplines. These include climate research, medical science, water management and water quality calculations, fluid dynamics and turbulence modeling, computational chemistry, genomics and bioinformatics. The addition of the new Onyx4 is the latest development in a long-standing relationship with SARA, which provides services to researchers throughout the Netherlands. SGI technology has powered cutting-edge scientific research at SARA for more than 10 years. Earlier this year, SARA acquired a 416-processor SGI Altix 3000 supercluster, running a standard Linux OS on each of its 64 processor nodes, which was integrated with SARA's existing 1024-processor SGI(R) Origin(R) 3000 server. Together, these systems form the Dutch National Supercomputer, funded by the Netherlands National Computing Facilities Foundation (NCF) under the umbrella of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). The integration of these powerful technologies forms a high-performance solution enabling SARA to remain at the scientific computing forefront. -- WestGrid, an eight-institution high-performance computing, networking and collaboration technology group in western Canada, has purchased an Onyx4 system to support the group's scientific and mathematical research work. Utilizing SGI's Visual Area Networking technology, researchers from throughout the 250-member WestGrid organization share in real time highly complex and massive data sets and graphical images rendered by the Onyx4. The visualization system is based at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, and works in conjunction with a broad array of HPC hardware, software and operating environments. WestGrid members utilize the Onyx4 as the visualization base for work in such areas medical and genetic research, oceanography, air pollution and environmental science, and particle physics. According to Dr. Jonathan Borwein, a WestGrid project leader and professor of mathematics at Simon Fraser University and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, SGI is the only technology company that combines both the compute power capable of handling WestGrid's intensive requirements along with high reliability, availability and stability. SGI also unveiled its powerful next-generation workstation platform, Silicon Graphics Tezro visual workstation. This innovative, high-performance system sets a new standard for desktop performance and reliability for visualization, multiprocessing, and digital media. Tezro is powered by up to four MIPS processors in an advanced, high-bandwidth architecture leveraged from the SGI(R) 3000 family of supercomputers. It delivers industry-leading visualization, multiformat and multiresolution digital media, and I/O connectivity on the desktop.