MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., -- SGI (NYSE: SGI) SGI demonstrated that it is One Step Ahead in the development of the Linux and applications software environments for Itanium-based products. Using a cluster of 16 Itanium processors SGI demonstrated a pre-release of SGI Itanium software, built on TurboLinux, comprising SGI Pro64 compilers, Advanced Clustering Environment (ACE) and system administration tools.
SGI today demonstrated five (5) major Independent Software Vendors (ISV) codes - AMBER, CACTUS, FASTA, FLUENT and STAR-CD running on pilot Itanium-based systems at SC2000 in Dallas, Texas. In addition to these commercial software packages SGI demonstrated three (3) research software application codes from the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) - these codes were: a Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) application, a materials research application and a Computational fluid dynamics application.
"Intel is delighted to see the strong program that SGI has developed with ISVs and early adopters of Itanium processor platforms. We believe that these projects will support a strong launch of Itanium products in the first half of 2001." stated Mike Fister, Vice President of Enterprise Platforms of Intel.
"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 Itanium-based systems for our diverse set of engineering and scientific problems." Remarked Al Stutz Director of High Performance Computing at OSC.
The SGI system used in this demonstration was configured as a Linux Beowulf cluster of eight nodes, with two pre-release Intel Itanium processors per node, an SGI 330 Visual Workstation head node and Myrinet III and Fast Ethernet 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's Pro64 compiler technology, we are seeing an impressive rate of progress in porting and certifying major applications codes on our Linux/Itanium systems."
Last year, at SC1999 in Portland SGI was the first supplier to demonstrate a major scientific application, Cactus, (an astrophysics code - http://www.cactuscode.org) running on prototype Itanium hardware.
"Last year, we first demonstrated our Cactus software at SC99 using the SGI technologies and the Itanium processors from Intel, we were the pioneers! Now, SGI has continued to show its leadership in assisting its software partners port their software applications to the next generation of Intel processors" stated Ed Seidel, PhD, of NCSA's Max Plank Institute.
About SGI
SGI provides a broad range of high-performance computing and advanced graphics solutions that enable customers to understand and conquer their toughest computing problems. Headquartered in Mountain View, California, with offices worldwide, the company is located on the Web at www.sgi.com.
SGI and SGI logo are trademarks of Silicon Graphics, Inc. Itanium and Intel are trademarks of Intel Corporations. Amber is the trademark of UCSF-Kollman. CACTUS is the trademark of NCSA/Max Plank Institute. Fasta is the trademark of University of Virginia. Fluent is the trademark of STAR-CD is the trademark of Computational Dynamics. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners
About OSC
OSC, a state-supported resource, provides a reliable high performance computing and networking infrastructure for a diverse, state-wide/regional community including education, academic research, industry, and state government.
