DALLAS, Texas, SC2000 (Nov. 6, 2000)--SGI (NYSE: SGI) demonstrated that it is ahead in the development of the Linux® and applications software environments for products based on Intel® ItaniumTM processors. Using a cluster of 16 Itanium processors, SGI displayed a prerelease version of SGITM software for Itanium, built on TurboLinux® software, comprising SGI Pro64TM compilers, SGITM Advanced Cluster Environment (ACE) and system administration tools.
SGI exhibited five major independent software vendor (ISV) codes--Amber®, CactusTM, FastaTM, FluentTM and STAR-CDTM--running on pilot Itanium processor-based systems at SC2000. In addition to these commercial software packages, SGI demonstrated three research software application codes from the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC): a Quantum® Chromodynamics (QCD) application, a materials research application and a computational fluid dynamics application.
"SGI has developed strong programs with ISVs and early adopters of Itanium processor platforms. These projects are prime examples of key customer and software community support for a timely Itanium platform release in the first half of 2001," stated Mike Fister, vice president of Enterprise Platforms at Intel.The SGITM system used in this demonstration was configured as a BeowulfTM cluster of eight nodes running on Linux, with two prerelease Intel® ItaniumTM processors per node, a Silicon Graphics® 330 visual workstation front-end node (which controls the flow of work to the compute nodes in a Beowulf cluster) and Myrinet-2000 and Fast EthernetTM interconnects.
Numerous pilot systems similar to this have also been installed at customer and developer sites throughout the world including Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC), SUNY-Buffalo and the University of Manchester, UK.
Ken Jacobsen, vice president of ISV Partner Programs at SGI, stated, "We are now supporting a large number of ISVs with pilot systems installed at their development centers. Using SGI Pro64 compiler technology, we are seeing an impressive rate of progress in porting and certifying major application codes on our Itanium processor-based SGI systems running Linux."Last year, at SC1999 in Portland, Ore., SGI was the first company to demonstrate a major scientific application, Cactus (a toolkit for parallel computing-www.cactuscode.org), running on prototype Itanium hardware."We are delighted to be working with SGI on what will be the second generation of Linux clusters for production high performance computing installed at OSC. We have been very impressed with the usability and performance of the SGI systems based on Itanium processors for our diverse set of engineering and scientific problems," said Al Stutz, director of High Performance Computing at OSC.
"Last year, we first demonstrated our Cactus software at SC1999 using SGI technologies and Itanium processors from Intel, we were the pioneers. SGI has continued to show its leadership in assisting its software providers to port their software applications to the next generation of Intel processors, and the performance is outstanding," stated Ed Seidel of NCSA/Max Plank Institute for Gravitational Physics.About SGI
Silicon Graphics is a registered trademark and SGI, the SGI logo and SGI Pro64 are trademarks of Silicon Graphics, Inc. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Itanium is a trademark and Intel is a registered trademark of Intel Corporation. TurboLinux is a registered trademark of TurboLinux, Inc. Amber is a registered trademark of UCSF-Kollman. Cactus is a trademark of NCSA/Max Plank Institute. Fasta is a trademark of the University of Virginia. Fluent is a trademark of Fluent, Inc. STAR-CD is a trademark of Computational Dynamics, Ltd. All other trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.