MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - SGI today announced that Raytheon Company (NYSE: RTN) has selected SGI(R) Origin(R) 3000 series high-performance computing systems to power a U.S. Upgraded Early-Warning Radar (UEWR) site in the United States. This UEWR site is a large, fixed, phased-array surveillance radar used to detect and track ballistic missiles targeted at the United States. As an upgrade of America's Early Warning Radar network, Raytheon is replacing computer hardware at an existing radar site on Beale Air Force Base, Calif. The new hardware includes SGI Origin 3000 series servers and SGI(R) Total Performance 9100 (TP9100) RAID to help the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense System precisely identify and track ballistic missile launches against the United States.
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| UEWR radar site |
Powered by SGI(R) technology, the UEWR will be able to search for different types of missiles, distinguish hostile objects such as warheads from other objects, and provide this data to other Ground-Based Midcourse Defense System elements. In addition to providing raw real-time mission-critical compute power for processing the data, the SGI Origin 3000 series systems are ideal storage management servers for managing very large data repositories typical of national missile defense programs. The SGI(R) TP9100 storage array is also the highest throughput RAID storage subsystem in its class. "Providing the technologies that meet America's critical requirements in the area of national missile defense has become an important part of SGI's defense business over the past few years and will continue to grow," said Tony Celeste, national director of defense business, SGI Federal. "Our high-performance computing systems enable U.S. commanders to have real-time access to missile warning data used to defend our nation against ballistic missile attacks. SGI is not only a technology supplier to the UEWR program, but also to the Space-Based Infrared System program, another vital early-warning system in the national missile defense arsenal." Prior to deployment of the Space-Based Infrared System Low satellites, the UEWR will be used to detect and track ballistic missiles during their midcourse phase. The UEWR is an important part of the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense System, a fixed, land-based, missile defense system with land- and space-based detection systems capable of responding to a limited strategic ballistic missile threat to the United States. Raytheon purchased the test hardware for UEWR in 2001 and bought SGI systems for the first deployment systems in the June quarter. These systems, which will be delivered in the December quarter, include special Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) developed by the Custom Engineering group at SGI for the UEWR program. The SGI Professional Services organization is also working on custom tensor software for the TPUs, which are used to detect, locate and characterize seismic events in order to distinguish between possible nuclear tests and earthquakes or other natural sources of seismic signals.
