Historic Innovations; Sets Sights on Next 25
SUNNYVALE, Calif., Oct. 1 /-/ -- Life-saving medicines and cancer treatments. Safer, more efficient automobiles and airplanes. New generations of space exploration vehicles. Groundbreaking climate change studies. Academy Award(R)-winning special effects. New sustainable forms of energy. And weapons and intelligence technologies so vital to America's security that they are considered national secrets.
Commemorating the start of its 25th year, SGI (Nasdaq: SGIC) today spotlighted how its computer, visualization and storage products have enabled its customers to change the world. Founded in 1982 by associate professor Jim Clark and engineering graduate students from Stanford University, SGI delivered its first product, a graphics terminal, the following year to a customer just down the road from its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters: NASA Ames Research Center.
"Year after year, NASA relies on systems from SGI to gain groundbreaking insights into our home planet and its place in the universe," said F. Ron Bailey, founder and first division chief of the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division at NASA Ames. "Here at NASA, SGI solutions have helped us establish a long-term course for manned space exploration, enabled researchers to more accurately pinpoint mankind's impact on our environment and climate, and equipped us to help usher in the next age of air travel on Earth."
"The ability to bring characters and stories to life with computer animation and rendering has transformed the entertainment industry, and SGI deserves much of the credit for that evolution," said Bob Lambert, senior vice president, Worldwide Technology Strategy, The Walt Disney Company, another of SGI's first customers. "As a recognized industry pioneer, SGI provided innovators technologies that would bring startling realism to animated features and special effects, and so we congratulate SGI on reaching this significant milestone."
Throughout its history, SGI has enabled countless breakthroughs in myriad industries and scientific disciplines pursued by customers dedicated to changing the world. Among these achievements:
-- The most extensive computer simulations ever done on HIV protease,
revealing for the first time the instant at which new drugs can enter
the molecule and deactivate it before HIV develops.
-- The first digital prototype of the world's largest passenger jet,
allowing engineers to efficiently test and modify the design before
construction begins.
-- A video archive of more than 50,000 testimonies from Holocaust
survivors and eyewitnesses collected by Steven Spielberg's Survivors
of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.
-- High-resolution, interactive visualizations of vast oil and gas
deposits located miles below the earth's surface and oceans, enabling
BP, Marathon Oil Company, Saudi Aramco, TOTAL and other energy giants
to plan cost-effective and safe drilling strategies.
-- Investigations into all aspects of cosmology -- from unraveling the
secrets of dark matter to galactic archaeology -- by Professor Stephen
Hawking's UK COSMOS consortium.
-- Eight consecutive years of Academy Award-winning special effects,
triggering a revolution in the way film, television and online media
content is produced.
-- The industry's first digital motion picture studio founded by
DreamWorks SKG, which produced such blockbusters as "Antz" and
"Shrek."
-- High-resolution weather models producing precise images for U.S.
military operations around the world and incorporating more than 6
million observations per day.
-- The first atomic-level simulation of a complete, functioning organism,
calculating the interactions of as many as 1 million moving atoms, and
offering researchers insights that may lead to new treatments for
plants, animals and humans.
-- Virtual prototypes and crash tests, enabling safer and more
energy-efficient automobiles, trains, trucks, airplanes and
helicopters.
-- For five Olympic Games in a row, "no failures and no downtime" in
creating NBC's on-air graphics for Olympics coverage.
-- Groundbreaking refinements to racing yacht designs and sailing
tactics, delivering faster times for multiple America's Cup and Prada
Challenge sailing teams.
-- History's most detailed interactive 3D rendering of an ancient
Egyptian mummy -- a digital reanimation of Sherit, a young girl who
died during the time of Christ.
-- For the first time, on-air broadcast graphics posting live 1994
presidential election results.
-- The first immersive visualization center dedicated to viewing, testing
and manipulating U.S. Navy ship designs, allowing naval engineers to
reduce the time and cost of building new ships while stress-testing
designs for particular sea and battle conditions.
-- A fully functioning "dry laboratory" at Memorial Sloan-Kettering
Cancer Center that simulates what happens in cells at the molecular
level to learn more about pathways for disease.
-- The world's first 64-bit gaming system, allowing Nintendo to bring
SGI-quality graphics to millions of homes.
-- Time Warner's "Full Service Network" interactive television trial,
which gave birth to the digital video recorder concept, and eventually
to Tivo.
-- Detailed studies, including debris analyses and structural tests,
enabling the NASA Space Shuttle program to return to space after the
Columbia accident.
"For 25 years, the important work undertaken by our customers shows that SGI's persistent drive to enable historic innovation pays real-life dividends to people in every corner of the world," said SGI CEO Bo Ewald. "Our mission now is to keep inventing the solutions that will help the next generation of innovators accelerate the forward progress of science, industry and entertainment over the next quarter century."
A History of Reinvention
The history of SGI is one of dramatic reinvention. It begins in the earliest days of computer graphics and leads to the company's current achievements in delivering deployable high-performance computing and data management solutions to solve the word's most challenging data-intensive problems.
SGI's litany of firsts begins in 1983. SGI's flagship product was based on the Geometry Engine(R) processor, the first specialized processor designed to accelerate the "inner loop" geometric computations needed to display images in three dimensions. That milestone was quickly followed by others, including:
-- In 1987, the company delivered the industry's first workstation based
on a RISC processor.
-- In 1991, SGI released the famed IRIS(R) Graphics Library.
-- In 1993, SGI hosted President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore
for the announcement of the Clinton Administration's technology
policy.
-- SGI opened the world's first collaborative visualization center in
1994-the SGI(R) Reality Center(R).
-- In 1999, SGI became the first system vendor to ship a SAN shared
filesystem, CXFS(TM).
-- In 2000, SGI transformed the industry with the introduction of its
NUMA server architecture.
-- In 2001, SGI became the first system vendor to open source a file
system, XFS(R).
-- Visual Area Networking transformed multiple industries after its 2002
introduction.
-- In 2003, SGI brought Linux(R) and high-performance computing (HPC)
together with the award-winning SGI(R) Altix(R) server line.
-- That same year, the company introduced its SGI(R) InfiniteStorage
solutions.
-- In 2004, SGI built and deployed the world's most powerful computer,
NASA's 10,240-processor Columbia supercomputer, in only 120 days.
-- In 2005, SGI delivered the industry's first native server-to-storage
InfiniBand solution for the SGI(R) InfiniteStorage TP9700 disk array.
-- In 2006, SGI packed the power of a supercomputer into a single blade
by introducing its SGI(R) RASC(TM) (Reconfigurable Application
Specific Computing) technology.
-- Also that year, the company transformed clusters into integrated
solutions with the SGI(R) Altix(R) XE line of factory-integrated
clusters.
-- Another 2006 milestone: An SGI Altix system ran a single instance of
Linux across 1,024 processors. Just three years earlier, many believed
Linux could not scale above 16 processors.
-- And this year, more industry firsts: The industry's first system to
feature the innovative new "Atoka" motherboard design, developed in
collaboration between Intel, Super Micro, and SGI.
-- Also in 2007, SGI made "green HPC" a reality with SGI(R) Altix(R) ICE,
a powerful bladed system purpose-built for HPC performance, while
helping customers achieve industry-leading space and energy
efficiencies.
SGI | Innovation for Results(TM)
SGI (Nasdaq: SGIC) is a leader in high-performance computing. SGI delivers a complete range of high-performance server and storage 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, 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.
(C) 2007 SGI. All rights reserved. SGI, Altix, IRIS, Reality Center, XFS, the SGI cube and the SGI logo are registered trademarks, and CXFS is a trademark, of SGI in the United States and/or other countries worldwide. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries. All other trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.
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pistacchio@sgi.com
650.933.5683
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