SGI Somnigroup International Inc

SGI Delivers Defense Department's Most Powerful Supercomputer 2,048-Processor SGI Altix System at ASC MSRC to Help U.S. Military Maintain Supremacy in Weapon Systems Design MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., April 25 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- SGI (NYSE:SGI) today announced that the U.S. General Services Administration, Federal Technology Service, on behalf of the Department of Defense (DoD) High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP), has purchased an SGI(R) Altix(R) supercomputer to help the United States military maintain its technological supremacy over its adversaries in weapon systems design. The Aeronautical Systems Center (ASC) Major Shared Resource Center (MSRC) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, has enhanced their computing power with the recent installation of a 2,048-processor SGI Altix supercomputer that will: aid weapon systems design of innovative materials; advance design concepts; improve and speed modification programs; increase high fidelity simulations; and enable more efficient tests and evaluations. Named "Eagle" by the ASC MSRC and part of the DoD HPCMP's Technology Insertion for fiscal year 2005 (TI-05), the Altix supercomputer is powered by 2,048 1.6 GHz Intel(R) Itanium(R) 2 processors, 2TB of memory, the SGI NUMAlink(TM) interconnect, and 128TB of disk. The entire 2TB of memory is globally addressable by any processor in the system, which will run the Linux(R) operating system and support the Intel C, C++, and Fortran compilers. This latest system expands ASC MSRC's SGI supercomputing capability to more than 4,100 processors spread across five separate shared memory SGI systems. During a test run at SGI's manufacturing facility in Chippewa Falls, Wisc., the new system achieved Linpack benchmark performance of 11.636 Tflop/s (trillions of calculations per second) while operating at over 90 percent efficiency. "SGI's technology enables the Department of Defense to develop next- generation weapon systems that allow the U.S. to maintain a technological advantage over our adversaries," said Benn Stratton, National Director of Defense & Civilian Agencies Business Unit, SGI Federal. "Our high-performance computing technology today is creating new ways for the Department of Defense to achieve military advantage and warfighting superiority on the 21st century battlefield. This massive shared-memory system from SGI allows the DoD to simulate entire aircraft, entire weapon systems, and entire battlefield engagements, with fidelity not possible before now." "In our efforts to serve more than 1,000 researchers throughout the DoD, we needed a supercomputer with industry-leading capability, scalability, production quality, ease of use, and the ability to handle massive amounts of data," said Steve Wourms, director, ASC MSRC. "SGI has had a presence at Wright-Patterson for almost 20 years. This is the latest example of SGI's unique ability to take state of the art, market-leading trends, such as the Linux operating system and Intel Itanium 2 CPUs, and make it easy to use for engineers who aren't computer scientists. This SGI Altix supercomputer at the ASC MSRC will help power groundbreaking research and development for the DoD weapon systems of the future." The increased performance and scalability provided by this Linux-based SGI supercomputer will help put advanced technology in the hands of U.S. forces more quickly, less expensively and with greater certainty of success. The SGI Altix system will not only meet the high performance computing requirements of the ASC MSRC but will also greatly benefit the broad user base of scientists and engineers across the HPCMP Centers who are driving the nation's scientific and engineering research and development. The SGI Altix family of servers and supercomputers are the most scalable Linux systems on the planet, designed to meet the requirements of scientific, engineering and creative users in the government who require record performance, unparalleled value, and industry-leading 64-bit Linux solutions to keep pace with the growing demands of government applications. In the government's Linux high-performance computing environment, tradeoffs are constantly being made between scaling up and scaling out. With SGI Altix servers and supercomputers, government technical users have the flexibility to do both. Based on a robust production-ready Linux environment and Intel Itanium 2 processors, the award-winning SGI Altix computing architecture allows both clustering (scaling out) of individual nodes and scalability (scaling up) of each node from 4 to 512 processors sharing up to 4TB of physical memory. About the ASC MSRC The Aeronautical Systems Center (ASC) Major Shared Resource Center (MSRC) is a computational science facility supporting Department of Defense (DoD) research, development, and test and evaluation communities with high performance computing and visualization resources. Created as part of the DoD's High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP), the ASC MSRC High Performance Computing Center is located on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and is one of four DoD MSRC sites. SILICON GRAPHICS | The Source of Innovation and Discovery(TM) SGI, also known as Silicon Graphics, Inc., is a leader in high-performance computing, visualization and storage. SGI's vision is to provide technology that enables the most significant scientific and creative breakthroughs of the 21st century. Whether it's sharing images to aid in brain surgery, finding oil more efficiently, studying global climate, providing technologies for homeland security and defense or enabling the transition from analog to digital broadcasting, SGI is dedicated to addressing the next class of challenges for scientific, engineering and creative users. With offices worldwide, the company is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., and can be found on the Web at http://www.sgi.com/. NOTE: Silicon Graphics, SGI, the SGI cube, the SGI logo and Altix are registered trademarks, and NUMAlink and The Source of Innovation and Discovery are trademarks of Silicon Graphics, Inc., in the United States and/or other countries worldwide. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in several countries. Intel and Itanium are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners. This news release contains forward-looking statements regarding financial and contractual commitments and the installation and performance of hardware and software by the U.S. government that are subject to risks and uncertainties. These risks and uncertainties could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in such statements. The reader is cautioned not to rely unduly on these forward-looking statements, which are not a guarantee of future or current performance. Such risks and uncertainties include reliance on performance of third-party partners, timely delivery of the systems, acceptance of the systems by the customer, changes in the authorization of government spending, and other risks detailed from time to time in the company's most recent SEC reports, including its reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q. MEDIA CONTACT Marla Robinson 256-773-2371 SGI PR HOTLINE 650-933-7777 SGI PR FACSIMILE 650-933-0283 DATASOURCE: SGI CONTACT: Marla Robinson of SGI, +1-256-773-2371, or Web site: http://www.sgi.com/

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