NEWS BRIEFS

San Jose, CA — SGI, long a leading supporter of Linux and the open source movement, provides complete, integrated software infrastructure for business-critical computing. To date Linux users have been faced with the task of identifying and integrating the fundamental software tools that support their business applications. SGI is now making these tools available in Linux in a suite of mature, integrated applications including the company’s Pro64 Compilers, Linux FailSafe for High-Availability, XFS File System and Advanced Cluster Environment (ACE).

These are mature applications, developed as complementary elements to work together, the result-an industry first-is a complete infrastructure upon which a commercial Linux user can depend.

“SGI, working with the Open Source community, has given the business Linux user a solid, interoperable, computing foundation,” said Jan Silverman, vice president, Advanced Systems Marketing, SGI. “Given that our customers and partners have recognized the growing importance of Linux as a business operating system, SGI has substantial demand for Linux-ready applications that can meet the demands of today’s commercial computing environments.”

SGI’s technology offerings are geared to enhance, expand and promote the usability, availability and applicability of Linux. By making available the industry’s highest performance compilers, in combination with the most scalable, journaled file system, industry-leading high-availability and a complete cluster solution, SGI is offering the production user a real opportunity to make the move to Linux.

Pro64 Compilers for Linux provide Linux developers with the potential to deliver a 30%-100% applications performance increase over that of a standard compiler implementation. This technology translates into significant cost benefits to the end user and is another important step in establishing Linux as a commercially viable platform.

SGI Linux Advanced Cluster Environment (ACE) provides the industry’s leading compute cluster environment on Linux by integrating various open-source and vendor-developed components. ACE, comprised of MPI programming, cluster-wide resource management, cluster management, centralized software installation and performance monitoring, is nimbly structured to adopt the latest research coming out of the Linux cluster community.

SGI Linux ACE is a fully tested and integrated cluster package for compute-intensive environments supporting both capability and throughput clusters. In cluster taxonomy, capability clusters address huge problems, which need to scale to multiple CPUs. Throughput clusters run multiple jobs (either different applications or multiple instances of the same application) in a batch-style environment.

A cutting edge cluster environment with low total cost of ownership SGI Linux ACE, a suite of integrated tools, eliminates the need to continually identify, download, and integrate available clustering software from the Internet. Each component of ACE has gone through intensive testing in SGI’s cluster engineering labs to ensure the interoperability and functionality of the whole package.

SGI Linux FailSafe is the next generation High-Availability (HA) solution for business critical applications. It provides a scalable cluster infrastructure for distributed cluster-aware applications to take advantage of, and at the same time, provides a simple way to make non-cluster-aware applications highly available without having to resort to expensive hardware solutions. Linux FailSafe provides a robust HA clustering environment with resilience form any single point of failure.

Linux FailSafe is architected to scale up to 16 nodes in a cluster with the cluster members sharing storage. Linux FailSafe and shared storage allows multiple servers to assume control of data in the event of a failure. In the event a server failed, applications may be resumed on one of other server(s) and the corresponding filesystems are automatically made available to the application.

Lack of rapid crash recovery in common Linux filesystems has been recognized as a significant problem. SGI’s XFS was designed around journaling technology and has been shipping on thousands of SGI systems, under IRIX, for over six years. Widely recognized as the industry’s leading high-performance file system, XFS has a standard interface allowing for a simple upgrade from any other standards-based filesystem. Now, on Linux, XFS is optimized for big data and big I/O.

SGI provides a broad range of high-performance computing and advanced graphics solutions that enable customers to understand and conquer their toughest computing problems. A strong advocate for open technology, SGI is committed to contributing technology from its core competencies in visualization and high-performance computing to the Open Source community to help solve complex data problems. Headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., with offices worldwide, the company is located on the Web at http://www.sgi.com .

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