RETAIL

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- SGI today announced that the Queensland Parallel Supercomputer Foundation (QPSF), a technology consortium of six universities in Australia's Queensland State, will shortly take delivery of two of the company's just-launched SGI(R) Altix(TM) 3000 supercomputing systems based on the Linux(R) operating system. QPSF members will use a 64-processor server primarily for batch processing and a 16-processor system for open-source applications development. Among the research groups expressing strong interest in the new SGI(R) platform are teams in bioinformatics, systems modeling, computational physics, computational chemistry and engineering. Much of their work centers on management of Queensland's abundant natural resources. "The approach that SGI has taken with its new Linux systems is very exciting," said QPSF acting CEO Ian Atkinson. "The benchmark results for the SGI Altix 3000 system architecture were amazing, but it's not just its processing performance that's exciting. Linux is a good idea. We have research groups lined up waiting to use the Altix systems. "These systems give us a complete range of benefits, including fast processor performance and the SGI NUMAlink flat memory space, which gives individual users a great deal of memory when they need it," he added. "The economics of this architecture for grid computing are extremely important to us as well. Single employees can manage big 60- and 80-processor systems, which is impossible when you tie many small Linux machines together. We have continued to expand our MIPS processor-based supercomputing capacity, for which there is a strong demand, but we know the SGI open-source Altix concept will be highly successful here." QPSF member institutions include the University of Queensland, James Cook University, Griffith University, Queensland University of Technology, Central Queensland University and University of Southern Queensland. The SGI Altix 3000 systems, to be installed at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, will be accessed by scientists at all member institutions for research applications that range from bioinformatics to marine ecology. Scientists at the six Queensland universities will access the SGI Altix clusters, both of which are powered by Intel(R) Itanium(R) 2 processors, across the state's high-bandwidth research network, which will soon be upgraded to 2.5Gb under the national Grangenet initiative. Quality of service and support was a significant factor in QPSF's tender process. "Support is clearly very important to us," said Atkinson. "There's a great deal of work going on here that we view as mission-critical. We're as impressed as ever with SGI's services and support programs, which remain at an impeccably high level." For further details about SGI's involvement with universities and research labs around the world, visit www.sgi.com/go/research.