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June 19, 2008

World's 10th Fastest Supercomputer Helps Find Oil and Gas

June 19 -- The 10th most powerful computer on earth is helping geophysicists determine the smartest and safest way to extract oil and gas locked miles below the earth's surface and oceans. The system is owned by Total, one of the largest energy companies in the world.

As announced today in the latest list of the world's fastest computers, the new supercomputer:

Is ranked No. 10 on the new Top500 list.
Can execute as many as 106 trillion operations every second.
Has more memory than 10,000 desktop computers.

Key facts

Total's new supercomputer is an SGI Altix ICE system powered by 10,240 Intel Xeon processor cores and 20,480 Gigabytes of memory, and integrated with a petabyte (or 1,000 trillion bytes) of SGI InfiniteStorage systems.
Total joins numerous other SGI customers on the Top500, including SGI customers like the New Mexico Computing Applications Center (No. 7), NASA Ames Research Center (No. 25), and Leibniz Rechenzentrum (No. 27).
SGI provides the most productive and efficient supercomputers on the Top500 list. The Top500's five most efficient supercomputers are all SGI systems, as are eight of the top 10, and 11 of the top 15. In fact, SGI is the only vendor to achieve efficiencies of more than 90 percent, with six systems achieving between 90 percent and 93.1 percent efficiency. Efficiency is calculated by comparing a system's measured maximum performance (RMax) vs. its theoretical peak performance (RPeak).

About SGI

SGI (NASDAQ: SGIC) 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 www.sgi.com.

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Source: SGI

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