SYSTEMS

Silicon Graphics will demonstrate the capabilities of its new Silicon Graphics Prism deskside systems at EAGE 2005, the most significant international gathering of professionals in the oil and gas industry. EAGE 2005 is an annual convention which unites the leading players in the energy sector from around the world and which will be held from June 13 to 16 in Madrid, Spain. With seismic data sets routinely surpassing 10 terabytes in size, the energy industry increasingly depends on advanced analysis and visualization of data assets. The Silicon Graphics Prism deskside system enables seismic analysts to view 20GB of data in a single session. Ideal for multiple-attribute tasks, the new system enables faster and more quantitative analysis of producing reservoirs, and speeds memory-intensive tasks like volume visualization and collaboration. In addition, energy companies require its geologists and geophysicists scattered around the globe to work together to make informed decisions based on this mountain of data, to increase the rates of discovery and the efficiency of producing oil and gas. SGI specializes in providing leading technology solutions that enable oil and gas companies to excel at complex tasks that turn data into knowledge and action for such decisions, including: * Scalable data visualization for exploration, reservoir management and facilities design spanning applications from the desktop to the immersive SGI Reality Center environment. * Data processing for seismic and reservoir simulation. * Collaborative technologies to bring virtual teams together. * Technical Data Management in heterogeneous storage environment. "SGI has a long history of enabling oil and gas companies to attain increased value from their oilfields," said Bill Bartling, senior director of Market Strategy, Energy, SGI. "SGI solutions arm energy leaders with highly scalable, industry-standard servers, visualization systems, and storage solutions whose benefits directly impact the bottom line." SGI offers the energy industry a combination of technology solutions that no other vendor can match: Compute. SGI Altix leverages Intel Itanium 2 processors, the Linux OS and built-in SGI NUMAflex architecture, to dramatically reduce the time and resources required to run technical applications such as seismic imaging and reservoir simulation by managing extremely large data sets in a single, system-wide, shared-memory space. Now, much larger and more complex seismic data sets can be processed entirely out of memory, enabling productivity breakthroughs that traditional clusters or enterprise-class UNIX servers can't tackle. Altix systems feature a fully supported, standard 64-bit Linux operating system and advanced SGI ProPack development environment specifically optimized for technical applications. ( For a complete list of energy applications certified for Altix, visit www.sgi.com/products/servers/altix/certified_apps.html. ) Visualization. In volume seismic interpretation and reservoir modeling, Silicon Graphics Prism visualization solutions can improve exploration success and reduce energy companies' operating costs through more accurate well placement and significantly improve balance sheet assets by increasing proved recoverable reserves. The system architecture of the Silicon Graphics Prism addresses terabyte-sized, highly complex and interrelated data as a single contiguous data set in memory, thereby making it possible to carry out analysis and the interchange of information much more quickly. Combined with unparalleled computational power and world-leading graphics processors, SGI delivers an unbeatable resource capable of meeting the demands posed by increasingly complex and risky exploration and the expectation of increasingly efficient exploitation of producing fields. Completing the system, Silicon Graphics offers Visual Area Networking which allows universal access to advanced visualization using any computing device over standard networks. Visual Area Networking enables the storage and processing of data at one place and users can interact with the data from a different location using any mix of client devices, including digitizer tablets and laptops. This enables a worker on a drilling platform on the Californian coast to have access to the seismic data on a Silicon Graphics Prism system in his office in Houston using a TeamRoom, a workstation, a laptop or his PDA with a wireless connection. Storage. SGI InfiniteStorage File System CXFS and DMF provide data centers with the bandwidth and storage capacity they need to accelerate workflow by efficiently processing and storing huge data sets. CXFS allows data to be shared between globally dispersed data centers at high bandwidth, without resorting to copying, thereby avoiding countless hours in lost productivity. With DMF, energy companies can dramatically and cost-effectively scale storage capacity without sacrificing the ability to access archived data rapidly. Likewise, the new SGI InfiniteStorage TP9700 RAID storage array marks the industry's first Fibre Channel storage array equipped with a 4Gb/second ( gigabit per second ) Fibre Channel interface. Silicon Graphics TP9700 represents great advancement in data management since it gives users unparalleled transmission speed and it is much less complex. The TP9700 constitutes a powerful base for high availability, management and data protection capabilities. A number of partners will be demonstrating their technology at the SGI booth including AGM, Austin Geomodeling, Barco, EDS, Engenio, Landmark, IFP, I/O, Mercury-TGS, Paradigm, Roxar, Tricon, VR-Context.