SUNNYVALE, Calif., Aug. 28 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Along with announcing its financial results for the fourth quarter and fiscal year 2008, SGI today spotlighted strong sales momentum across all its product lines and throughout every targeted market and region.
In Fourth Quarter, Continued Penetration in Key Markets
In the quarter that ended June 27, 2008 SGI continued its momentum as a supplier of high-performance, energy-efficient systems for commercial, industrial and technical customers. Among the company's key fourth quarter wins:
-- Sony DADC purchased its second SGI(R) Storage Area Network (SAN) implementation to enable a Manufacturing On Demand (MOD) offering for its optical disc manufacturing facility in Terre Haute, Ind. The SGI(R) solution supports Sony DADC in offering existing clients orders as small as one disc for CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray Discs and other media. This MOD system frees up Sony DADC's higher volume equipment, which also uses SGI technology to produce hundreds or thousands of discs at a time. The new implementation includes a four-core, 16GB SGI(R) Altix(R) 450 server, four SGI(R) InfiniteStorage Filesystem CXFS(TM) clients, a 24TB SGI(R) InfiniteStorage 4500 system, two Brocade 5000 fiber channel switches, and an SGI(R) InfiniteStorage Data Migration Facility license to accommodate a 15TB data management environment. SGI Professional Services worked with Sony DADC to design both SAN environments. -- NASA has chosen SGI to supply its next major supercomputer, a 20,480-core SGI(R) Altix(R) ICE system, after a competitive evaluation the space agency launched last year. The new SGI(R) system, to be installed this summer in the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, presents vast new opportunities for scientists and engineers who are attempting to tackle some of the largest and most complex problems in history. The supercomputer will be capable of generating 245 trillion operations per second (Teraflops). NASA also will deploy a next-generation SGI(R) InfiniteStorage InfiniBand disk solution capable of storing and managing 450 Terabytes (TB) of data -- an amount five times larger than the entire print collection of the Library of Congress. The installation also includes a 115TB SGI(R) InfiniteStorage NEXIS Network Attached Storage solution. -- GENCI (Grand Equipement National de Calcul Intensif), the French national high-performance computing (HPC) organization, acquired and is installing a massive supercomputing and storage solution from SGI at CINES, France's National Computer Center for Higher Education in Montpelier. An SGI Altix ICE system with 12,288 processor cores, each with 4GB of memory, the new supercomputer is capable of operating at 147 Teraflops, making it one of the fastest supercomputers in the world. In addition to half a Petabyte of on-line disk powered by SGI(R) InfiniteStorage 4600 systems, GENCI is implementing SGI InfiniteStorage DMF. French researchers will use the system for climatology and sustainable development, space and aeronautical research, energy, life and materials sciences, and other disciplines. -- MTU Aero Engines invested in a 48-core, 384GB SGI Altix 450 solution to further optimize its SAP operational environment. -- The China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC), one of the largest state-owned oil giants in China, engaged SGI(R) Professional Services to design and implement a high-performance data visualization solution to study subsurface oil and gas deposits and determine the safest and most efficient ways to extract them. The SGI systems are being used to visualize data sets that today range from 500GB to 600GB in size in such geophysics applications as Landmark GeoProbe and Schlumberger GigaViz and Petrel. CNOOC selected two SGI(R) Virtu(TM) VS systems for its Zhanjiang facility, and three for its Beijing facility. CNOOC chose SGI because of its reputation for reliable, scalable visualization solutions. -- General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems purchased a 64-core, 1TB SGI(R) Altix(R) 4700 system to perform complex data processing. The system, selected after a competitive evaluation and benchmarking process, ties into a large StorNext SAN. In addition to price and performance requirements, a key criterion for selecting SGI was the company's ability to provide a security-certified implementation of Linux(R), and its responsiveness to the needs of the customer. -- The French Atomic Energy Agency, or Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique (CEA), extended the capacity of its SGI InfiniteStorage Data Migration Facility (DMF) environment to 5 Petabytes, giving CEA the ability to adapt to changing data access patterns on the fly without impacting productivity. At its Computing Center for Research and Technology (CCRT), CEA also added a 600TB SGI(R) InfiniteStorage10000 solution. CEA researchers pursue breakthroughs in energy, information and health technologies, as well as defense and national security. -- Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD), the German Weather Service, purchased SGI(R) Altix(R) shared-memory systems with a total of 472 processor cores and 2,844GB of memory for use as Oracle database servers in weather forecasting and climate studies. -- The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) engaged technical experts from SGI Professional Services as key developers of ESMF, or the Earth System Modeling Framework. ESMF is software infrastructure used at a broad spectrum of research and operational centers, including the National Weather Service, the Navy, Air Force and Army, NASA, and universities. ESMF enables models developed at these sites to be coupled together to form complex simulations used for climate prediction, weather and space weather forecasting, and hydrology. -- Working with the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), SGI demonstrated how a new blade-based SGI server could help CSIRO keep up with the demands of scientific research while addressing its finite power and space limitations. The demonstration led CSIRO to acquire a 128-core SGI Altix 4700 system ith 512GB of globally shared memory. The new SGI Altix 4700 system uses half the energy and commands just 25 percent of the data center space of CSIRO's four-year-old SGI(R) Altix(R) 3700 server, while delivering 28 percent greater performance. CSIRO will tie the new system into its existing 1.5PB SGI InfiniteStorage Data Migration Facility environment. SGI estimates the new installation will save CSIRO at least 288 Megawatt-hours of power over three years. -- Princeton University upgraded an existing SGI Altix system, creating a 320-core Altix with 1,280GB of shared memory for use in astrophysics, computer science, engineering research and a range of compute-intensive research in pure mathematics. Princeton plans to add another 256GB of memory to the upgraded Altix, installed at the Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Education (PICSciE). The university will leverage the upgraded system, popular with researchers whose codes are optimized for shared-memory architectures, to support a growing number of users. To support a full spectrum of scientific codes, Princeton also maintains a 768-core SGI Altix ICE integrated blade system. -- Vandenberg Air Force Base turned to SGI for a comprehensive upgrade of the digital media infrastructure at its Major Test Range Facility Base (MTRFB). As part of a transition to high-speed, high-definition digital cameras, SGI is retooling MTRFB's digital media environment to accommodate additional data feeds, and new ingest, storage, editing, play-out and production capabilities. The solution includes an SGI Altix ICE system for rendering, SGI InfiniteStorage SAN, a real-time CXFS environment for transparent file sharing across platforms, a high-speed InfiniteStorage NAS solution, and Sony 4K digital projection system. -- In an effort to produce actionable intelligence fused from multiple sensors and digital media assets, The Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) purchased an SGI solution that integrates an SGI Altix 450 server, an InfiniteStorage SAN and a real-time CXFS environment into a very diverse heterogeneous compute and network environment -- all based on an open systems, high-speed InfiniBand LAN and WAN enabled architecture. The high-performance capabilities that SGI integrates into the solution helps NRL improve image acquisition, storage, retrieval and processing to deliver immediate insights to the battlefield. -- Several additional commercial wins, including sales to Sanofi-Aventis, Tata Motors, and a major online trading community. -- SGI also signed a Service Provider agreement with Verari Systems(R). As the latest member of the SGI Support Solutions Plus program, Verari will contract with SGI to provide world-class service and support to Verari customers in Europe, Middle East and Africa and in Asia Pacific regions. A Strong Close to a Strong Fiscal Year
Those Q4 sales helped to cap off a momentous year for SGI -- one that saw the company win some of the most headline-grabbing contracts in HPC. Major wins from fiscal year 2008 include:
-- Total Exploration and Production, which deployed a 10,240-core, 20TB SGI Altix ICE system, the most powerful supercomputer ever installed at an industrial site. -- North German Supercomputing Alliance (HLRN), with a 5,824-core SGI Altix ICE system with 15.8TB of memory and a Petabyte SGI InfiniteStorage 4600 system, demonstrating that SGI leads in solving the toughest scientific computing challenges. -- A 14,336-core, 28TB SGI Altix ICE system, acquired by state of New Mexico for the New Mexico Computing Applications Center. -- Chrysler, which invested in a 212-core SGI(R) Altix(R) Hybrid Cluster and an 11.5TB SGI InfiniteStorage solution for designing safer and more energy-efficient cars and trucks. Superior performance and flexibility were major factors in Chrysler's selection of SGI. -- And a host of other industrial and commercial customers, including Merck, National Basketball Association, Honda Racing and Sikorsky Aircraft.
Renowned for delivering energy-efficient solutions that reduce power and cooling costs for customers, SGI was the first server manufacturer to ship 80 PLUS(R) certified single-output power supplies for redundant data center applications. SGI also belongs to a number of industry organizations devoted to promoting energy efficiency and environmental responsibility. These include The Green Grid(SM) and the Climate Savers Computing Initiative(SM).
Award-winning SGI(R) servers, clusters and supercomputers leverage the power and scalability of Intel(R) Itanium(R) 2 processors or Intel(R) Dual/Quad-core Xeon(R) processors.
Additional Resources:
NASA (press release May 6, 2008) http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2008/may/nasa.html
GENCI (Grand Equipement National de Calcul Intensif) (press release June 17, 2008) http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2008/june/genci.html
Total Exploration and Production (press announcement June 15, 2008) http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2008/june/top10.html
North German Supercomputing Alliance (HLRN) (press release July 3, 2008) http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2008/july/hlrn.html
New Mexico Computing Applications Center (press release January 28, 2008) http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2008/january/nmcac.html
National Basketball Association (press release April 14, 2008) http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2008/april/nba.html
"Supporting Honda's Environmental Approach to Formula One" article in SGI Magazine http://www.sgi.com/subscribe/sgi_magazine/08_june/08SupportingHonda.html
SGI | Innovation for Results(TM)
SGI is a leader in high-performance computing. SGI delivers a broad range of high-performance server, storage and visualization solutions along with industry-leading professional services and support that enable its customers to overcome the challenges of complex data-intensive workflows and accelerate breakthrough discoveries, innovation and information transformation. SGI helps customers solve significant challenges whether it's enhancing the quality of life through drug research, designing and manufacturing safer and more efficient cars and airplanes, studying global climate change, providing technologies for homeland security and defense, or helping enterprises manage large data. With offices worldwide, the company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., and can be found on the Web at sgi.com.
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