The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing
August 31, 2007
SUNNYVALE, Calif., Aug. 30 -- With a new CEO at its helm, SGI completed its fiscal year 2007 with the launch of a breakthrough blade system purpose-built for high-performance computing (HPC), while racking up significant customer wins across SGI's server and storage product lines. The company also released financial results for the Fiscal Year 2007 today (http://www.sgi.com/company_info/investors/).
The company's fourth quarter, which ended June 29, was SGI's first fiscal quarter under the leadership of Bo Ewald, who was named CEO in April. Working with SGI's leadership and global workforce, Ewald has focused on positioning SGI for sustainable long-term growth and innovation through delivery of uniquely competitive, customer-focused solutions.
New products and industry alliances
In June, SGI unveiled SGI Altix ICE 8200, the first in a new line of bladed servers designed to close the growing gap between performance and user productivity. Built to accommodate large and varied scale-out workloads, SGI Altix ICE delivers the advantages of blade computing without forcing users to accept compromises in price/performance, power and space efficiency, reliability and manageability. Its ultra-dense rack architecture delivers up to 40 percent more compute performance per floor tile than competing blades. Meanwhile, the Altix ICE system's highly efficient design minimizes demands on the data center's space and power, helping to relieve the growing burden of housing, powering and cooling today's HPC systems.
Also during the quarter, SGI joined the BioIT Alliance, a group of organizations working together to realize the potential of personalized medicine. The Alliance unites SGI with other innovators in the pharmaceutical, biotech, hardware, and software industries to explore new ways to share complex biomedical data and collaborate among multi-disciplinary teams to speed the pace of discovery in the life sciences.
Major NASA acquisitions and contracts
In August, NASA turned to SGI to acquire the world's largest shared-memory supercomputer as part of NAS Technology Refresh (NTR), a four-phase evaluation and procurement process that eventually will replace the Columbia supercomputer system, powered by SGI Altix. Installed in August at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at the Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., the new system is the first supercomputer to operate 2,048 Intel Itanium 2 processor cores and 4TB of memory under a single copy of Linux OS; as such, it is the largest Linux single system image (SSI) in the world. NASA also acquired two ultra-dense SGI InfiniteStorage 10000 systems totaling 240TB to efficiently handle the massive data storage requirements.
Separately, SGI was again named a prime contract holder for a multi-billion dollar U.S. Government IT purchasing program, also administered by NASA. Under the seven-year NASA Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP) IV Program, every product SGI sells is available to NASA and other U.S. Government agencies at prices published on the SEWP IV schedule. The purchasing program represents total procurements that could reach as much as $5.6 billion through April of 2014. The program involves 37 Competed Prime Contract Holders offering a wide range of IT products. SGI is the only Contract Holder to win a Class 4, High-Performance Compute Servers, contract.
Customers embrace new SGI Altix ICE systems
Just weeks after its June launch, SGI reports brisk sales of its new SGI Altix ICE platform. Among the customer wins were:
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