STORAGE

Silicon Graphics today announced that Pirelli Labs, the excellence research and development center of Italy's Pirelli & C. S.p.A. (PC:MI), will use SGI server and storage technologies as tools for its advanced activities in the field of photonics, sending communications on particles of light. One of the world's leading makers of tires and advanced solutions for telecommunications, Pirelli will drive its leading-edge design and analysis efforts with a milestone system: the 1,500th SGI Altix server sold worldwide. Pirelli Labs, based in Milan, Italy, purchased a 16-processor SGI Altix 350 server with 32GB of memory, the 1500th Altix sale since SGI first launched the award-winning Altix product line in January 2003. With the Pirelli sale, SGI Altix systems have put more than 47,800 Intel Itanium 2 processors in customer sites worldwide. Pirelli also purchased a SGI InfiniteStorage TP9300 solution to provide efficient management and access to design and analysis data. Together the SGI solutions will help Pirelli engineers conduct computational fluid dynamics and finite element analysis on new products and materials. Pirelli will also leverage the SGI technologies to develop a new generation of integrated optical systems based on nanotechnologies. Working with researchers at MIT, the company aims to utilize all of the wavelengths available in a fiber optic cable to maximize the amount of data transmitted on each fiber. The result would be a major breakthrough in the field of broadband telecommunications. Pirelli evaluated the SGI Altix 350 system against traditional "white box" clusters. The large-node, global shared-memory architecture of SGI Altix, as well as the system's superior price/performance and 64-bit Linux OS environment, proved decisive for Pirelli. "Since its introduction, SGI Altix has increased productivity and delivered remarkable new capabilities to customers in manufacturing, life sciences, defense, aerospace, earth sciences and a host of other demanding high-performance computing environments," said Jeff Greenwald, senior director, Product Management and Marketing, SGI. "Along with SGI InfiniteStorage solutions, Altix continues to help organizations sharpen their competitive edge. So it's particularly fitting that Pirelli, with its long history of innovation, continues its remarkable work on Altix system No. 1,500."