SGI Highlights Key Sales, Groundbreaking New Products in Second Quarter of Fiscal Year 2006

Products and Solutions

At the SC|05 supercomputing conference in November, the company unveiled its new SGI(R) Altix(R) 4000 platform that combines industry-standard components and the world's most powerful server architecture in a highly dense and deployable blade-based form factor. With the Altix 4000 platform, SGI has integrated its renowned scalable shared-memory SGI(R) NUMAflex(TM) architecture with blade packaging to create the first 64-bit Linux(R) server with a blade design that offers true "plug and solve" flexibility. The new systems allow users to readily configure any computing vision of a single platform accommodating the needs of a broad range of applications.

Also at SC|05, SGI announced that it is the first provider to offer a complete, high-performance, native InfiniBand interconnect solution that includes both servers and storage integrated in an InfiniBand fabric. InfiniBand is a high-speed networking technology that has become prevalent in server-to-server connectivity. The new InfiniBand-based SGI(R) InfiniteStorage TP9700 system provides four 10Gb/second InfiniBand host connections which can be plugged directly into a customer's InfiniBand fabric.

SGI also announced the availability of Open|SpeedShop(TM), an open-source version of the SGI(R) SpeedShop(TM) performance analysis tool is now available to developers. The multi-platform Linux(R) tool helps developers and end users analyze the performance of applications running on single-node to large-scale IA32, IA64, EM64T and AMD64 platforms. The new open-source tool is the result of a cooperative government/industry effort between SGI and the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). Industry Awards

During the quarter, SGI solutions amassed a variety of industry awards. In the 2005 HPCwire Innovation Awards, the company's groundbreaking Silicon Graphics Prism(TM) systems swept top honors for visualization products. The readers of HPCwire, the journal of record for the high-performance computing (HPC) industry, proclaimed the Linux OS-based Silicon Graphics Prism "Most Innovative Visualization Product or Technology," and "Best Price-Performance in High-End Graphics or Visualization." HPCwire editors lauded the SGI line with "Most Innovative Visualization Product or Technology," and "Best Price-Performance in High-End Graphics or Visualization" honors.

The SGI Altix family also took top honors in the SC|05 Tour de HPCycles panel session. In the competition fashioned after the cycling world's Tour de France, a panel of HPC end users voted to award jerseys for a range of categories. SGI Altix earned the coveted Yellow Jersey, the award for best overall supercomputer. Customers

SGI's second fiscal quarter saw key customer wins that crossed a broad range of industries and geographies: -- Brazil's National Institute of Meteorology (INMET) turned to SGI to

equip its Division of Numerical Modeling with SGI compute,

visualization and SAN solutions to serve as an efficient and scalable

platform for high-resolution weather modeling and a range of

forecasting applications. INMET purchased a 64-processor SGI(R)

Altix(R) 3700 Bx2 supercomputer with 96GB of memory and running

Novell(R) SUSE(R) Linux Enterprise Server 9 with SGI(R) ProPack(TM) 4,

SGI(R) InfiniteStorage Shared Filesystem CXFS(TM), two dual-processor

SGI visualization systems, and four years of support from SGI

Professional Services. With the new solutions, which were selected

after competitive benchmarking against several competing products,

INMET will run a wide variety of complex meteorological sciences models

and applications, including the High Resolution Model, the High

Resolution Brazilian Model, the Grid Analysis and Display System, and

several in-house codes. Key to the selection of SGI Altix was its

powerful shared-memory architecture, as INMET's source code demands

large volumes of memory, and the Altix architecture simplifies code

maintenance and updates. -- The California Institute for Telecommunications and Information

Technology (Calit2) at the University of California, San Diego,

purchased SGI visualization and storage technology for the new Richard

C. Atkinson Hall to provide research scientists, media artists,

educators, and entertainers with the most cutting-edge visualization

environment available today. During the building's debut event,

iGrid2005, in late September, the audience in the New Media Arts

theater was shown numerous demonstrations of real-time, uncompressed 4K

digital imagery projected by a Sony 4K digital projector powered by a

Silicon Graphics Prism visualization system, and stored imagery

streaming at 24 frames-per-second from the SGI(R) InfiniteStorage RM660

disk array. The program included a demonstration from San Diego State

University, where a Silicon Graphics Prism system running GeoFusion

software was used among many other efforts to process thousands and

thousands of before-and-after aerial photos of Hurricane Katrina and

stream them on the Web for easy access by relief organizations. At full

occupancy (expected soon), more than 900 researchers from two dozen

departments of UCSD, all of whom are immersed in a high-bandwidth

environment where visual technologies are ubiquitous, will be housed in

Atkinson Hall. The UCSD Division of Calit2 purchased a Silicon Graphics

Prism visualization system with 48GB RAM and 8 Intel Itanium 2

processors running the Linux environment and an SGI InfiniteStorage

RM660 system with 21.6TB of disk storage. -- Goodrich Corporation's Surveillance and Reconnaissance Systems (SRS)

provides the world's highest performance cameras and ground stations

for capturing and interpreting reconnaissance and surveillance data.

The industry leader turned to SGI for visualization, storage and data

management solutions to support the development of the ground

components of a new airborne reconnaissance system. For the program,

Goodrich SRS, located in Worcs, England, purchased several Silicon

Graphics(R) Tezro(R) desktop visualization systems and a 1.7TB SGI(R)

InfiniteStorage TP9300 SAN enabled by SGI's shared filesystem CXFS and

a 16-port Brocade SAN switch. With CXFS, Goodrich engineers can

transparently access large data sets across the SAN without having to

physically transfer them from system to system. -- The Hungarian Meteorological Service (HMS) selected SGI to supply a new

weather forecasting supercomputer in order to meet with the ever

increasing requirements of ultra-short range and short range

atmospheric forecasting. The decision was reached after an exhaustive

benchmarking process involving platforms from SGI, IBM and HP. HMS

awarded the contract to SGI due to the SGI Altix platform's superior

performance on their two key modeling and forecasting applications:

ALADIN (a numerical weather prediction model developed by a broad

consortium of European and North-African countries) and MM5 (an

atmospheric model developed in the US). HMS purchased a 144-processor

SGI Altix 3700 BX2 supercomputer with 288GB of memory and running

Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9. The SGI shared-memory platform

so excelled in the benchmark tests that the 144-processor Altix

configuration outperformed competing systems powered by around 200

processors. With the help of the new Altix system, HMS scientists can

compute forecasts in just a few minutes, instead of the hour required

on the institute's current hardware. Deployed in two phases by

mid-2006, the new system will also allow HMS to exploit even higher

resolution numerical models with more complex dynamical and physical

computations. -- Japan's Institute of Fluid Science-Tohoku University purchased a

Silicon Graphics Prism visualization system to support next-generation

global environmental research. The 256-processor system will assist

institute researchers in visualizing large-scale fluid simulations. The

Silicon Graphics Prism system will interoperate with a scalable SGI(R)

Altix(R) 3000 server based on the 64-bit Linux OS, a vector parallel

NEC computer, external secondary storage systems and data archive

systems, all of which are interconnected via high-speed network,

enabling sharing of large files with the SGI InfiniteStorage CXFS

shared filesystem and the NEC GFS global file system attached to the

Storage Area Network (SAN). -- Max-Planck-Institut for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany, to

accelerate its efforts to achieve breakthroughs in theoretical

astrophysics, upgraded its existing SGI Altix 3700 Bx2 supercomputer.

The institute added 48 Intel Itanium 2 processors and 96GB of memory to

its high-density Altix system, creating a single supercomputer with 112

processors and 224GB of globally addressable memory. Blistering

application performance on its original Altix system prompted the

institute to extend its investment in SGI's standards-based compute

solution. The institute's success on the Altix platform has proven that

SGI technology is an ideal foundation for the next-generation, 69

TeraFLOP German National Supercomputer HLRB-II, currently being

installed at Leibniz Rechenzentrurn Computing Center (LRZ), a national

computer center also located in Munich that serves as a resource to

researchers nationwide. -- MECHAMAP, the Mechanical Material and Parts Center of South Korea,

acquired SGI server, storage and data management solutions to support

and streamline its CAE operations. Running Fluent and an in-house

mechanical engineering code developed by Pusan University, MECHAMAP

purchased a factory-integrated SGI Altix(R) 1350 cluster powered by 120

Intel Itanium 2 processors and 120GB of memory, and a 3.2TB SGI

InfiniteStorage TP9300 array. MECHAMAP also acquired a four-processor

SGI(R) Altix(R) 350 system to use as a Network Attached Storage (NAS)

server. The Altix server is connected to the ABCC Portable Batch System

(PBS) Pro cluster, a workload and resource management system. MECHAMAP

selected SGI over competing solutions from HP and IBM due to SGI's

superior performance and ability to support "fat nodes" to handle

large-scale problems more easily. -- The National Center of High-Performance Computing (CENAPAD-SP) located

at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in Brazil, to further its

mission to serve as a resource for both academia and the business

community, purchased large-node SGI server cluster and storage

solutions that will support compute- and data-intensive applications in

chemistry, physics, engineering, biology, computer science, and

mathematics. CENAPAD-SP acquired six SGI Altix 350 nodes clustered via

an InfiniBand network and powered by a total of 70 Intel Itanium 2

processors and featuring 284GB of memory and running Novell SUSE Linux

Enterprise Server 9 with ProPack 4. Serving the cluster will be a 5.6TB

SGI InfiniteStorage TP9300 disk array. Driving the choice of SGI over

competing systems from HP, Cray, Sun and NEC were several key factors:

the availability of large, robust, independently scalable nodes

connected via high-speed InfiniBand; the Altix platform's

performance-enhancing ability to balance memory availability and

processing power; the ability of SGI's rich set of software tools and

libraries to ensure redundancy, reliability, world-class performance

and easy system management; SGI's competitive and comprehensive storage

offerings; and the superior computational power of the SGI Altix

architecture. -- PetroChina Company Limited, one of the largest companies in the

People's Republic of China, selected an SGI InfiniteStorage Storage

Area Network (SAN) solution to help manage rapidly growing seismic

processing and petroleum reserve simulation data. PetroChina purchased

a 20TB SAN based on the SGI InfiniteStorage TP9700 array and SGI

InfiniteStorage Shared Filesystem CXFS. With CXFS, PetroChina engineers

can transparently share massive data sets without the need to

physically transfer them from one location to another. -- PPG Industries, an industrial and consumer materials maker, purchased

SGI server and storage solutions backed by SGI Professional Services

support to upgrade its computational chemistry, materials research and

CAE technology infrastructure. PPG purchased a 32-processor SGI Altix

350 server with 64GB of memory, a direct-attached 4TB SGI

InfiniteStorage TP9300 disk array, a tape library for back-up storage,

and three years of SGI support and system administration. PPG engineers

will use the new resources to tackle complex studies using applications

such as Fluent, Gaussian, Accelrys, and ANSYS. PPG chose SGI over

several competing solutions because of superior price/performance,

PPG's long relationship with SGI, and the ability to easily integrate

new SGI solutions with PPG's existing legacy SGI hardware. -- ProSiebenSat.1 Produktion GmbH, the technical service division of the

ProSiebenSat.1 Media AG, is implementing its ability to centrally store

and access broadcast content based on a server, storage and

hierarchical storage management (HSM) solution from SGI. Based in

Berlin and Munich, ProSiebenSat.1 Produktion purchased a NAS server

with four-processor SGI Altix 350 system with 12GB of memory.

ProSiebenSat.1 Produktion purchased multiple licenses of SGI Data

Migration Facility (DMF), an HSM software solution that will enable the

production operation to leverage its new 12.6TB SGI InfiniteStorage

TP9700 array in Munich and another 21TB SGI InfiniteStorage TP9700

array in Berlin to expand its online-production-storage capacity. One

more important part of this solution is SGI's Digital Mass Storage

Engine (DMS), which allows a "Partial Restore" of existing and archived

clips. With the new system, the German broadcasting enterprise will

have rapid and easy access to clips and content without having to

re-ingest them. The new system also provides access to archive using

the company's existing workflow, while enabling production engineers to

store and restore all video formats. -- Robarts Research Institute, Canada's leading independent center for

medical research, deployed a major upgrade of its SGI resources with a

64-processor SGI Altix 3700 Bx2 supercomputer with 64GB of memory to

further drive its research in Image-guided Surgery and Therapy,

including the treatment and surgery of cancer. Robarts also upgraded

its existing Silicon Graphics Prism visualization system, adding two

additional graphics pipes for a total of four. The institute also

purchased a four-pipe graphics upgrade for its Virtual Augmentation &

Simulation for Surgery & Therapy (VASST) environment. The systems

leverage SGI InfiniteStorage Shared Filesystem CXFS, backed by 4Gb

Ethernet controllers, to manage Robarts' rapidly growing database of

important medical research data. -- The Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL), a National User

Facility whose sophisticated X-ray resources are used to investigate

atomic and molecular properties of matter to benefit environmental and

medical research and other fields, recently purchased a 22TB SGI

InfiniteStorage Storage Area Network to streamline the management of

the lab's growing crystallography experiment data. SSRL's SAN leverages

a 24-port Gigabit Ethernet switch and dual 16-port Fibre Channel

switches for rapid data access, while SGI InfiniteStorage CXFS, the

industry's fastest shared filesystem, allows SSRL researchers using SGI

servers to transparently share data over the SAN without having to move

large files across the network. SSRL selected the SGI technologies,

which include an SGI InfiniteStorage TP9700 Serial ATA disk array,

because of the proven performance and reliability of SGI storage and

CXFS solutions. -- The Swedish National Supercomputer Center (NSC) at Linkoping

University, in an effort to handled ever-more complicated computational

chemistry, physics, bioinformatics and engineering challenges,

purchased a 64-processor SGI Altix 3700 Bx2 supercomputer. Equipped

with 512GB of memory in a single node, the new system will rank as one

of the largest nodes, in terms of shared memory size, in northern

Europe. NSC researchers will run advanced applications such as

Gaussian, VASP and DALTON, as well as other advanced scientific codes,

on the new Altix system. The university selected SGI over competing

platforms because of SGI's application performance, support for open

systems, and unequaled shared-memory architecture. -- The Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg (TU-Hamburg) Data Center,

on a quest to replace an HP Superdome server as the primary compute

resource for the university's community of HPC users, selected SGI

Altix over an array of cluster solutions and supercomputers. TU-Hamburg

purchased a 48-processor SGI Altix 4700 system with 96GB of memory and

a dual-processor SGI(R) Altix(R) 330 entry-level server with 4GB of

memory. The systems are targeted for use by a wide range of researchers

and faculty running such applications as Abaqus, Fluent, LS-Dyna and

Star-CD. Later in 2006, TU-Hamburg plans to upgrade the Altix 4700

system with another 48 dual-core Intel Montecito processors and 224GB

of memory, bringing the total CPU count to 96 processors with 320GB of

memory on the Altix system. -- Thales, one of the world's leading providers of military and civil

aviation training solutions, purchased five Silicon Graphics Prism

systems, each equipped with eight processors and four graphics pipes

and running Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9. The systems will

provide updates to F-16 jet simulators. Each Silicon Graphics Prism

system will be tasked with running the host aircraft dynamics

application that feeds six cockpit displays. Displays will feature

real-time data including radar warnings, radar displays, and heads-up

displays. Thales selected SGI over PC-based cluster solutions because

of the Silicon Graphics Prism system's ability to operate multiple

processors under a single instance of Linux, its ability display

multiple graphics outputs from one system, and SGI's real-time

enhancement to industry-standard Linux. -- The Universities of Melbourne, Queensland and Flinders in Australia is

breaking new ground in the analysis of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)

of the human brain. University researchers will soon have an array of

powerful new SGI resources at their disposal: A 64-processor SGI Altix

3700 Bx2 supercomputer with 256GB of memory; a 20-processor SGI Altix

350 mid-range server with 40GB of memory; and a six-processor SGI Altix

330 entry-level server with 48GB of memory. The SGI compute resources

are integrated with a 6TB direct-attached SGI InfiniteStorage TP9300

array and a 57TB SGI Data Migration Facility, which allows for mass

data sets to be stored in an efficient and accessible manner, allowing

researchers to focus on science rather than data management. Using

Star-P software, Melbourne researchers will be able to quickly and

easily parallelize their desktop FSL imaging codes and algorithms to

efficiently run on their new SGI Altix systems, thus applying SGI's

powerful shared-memory architecture to even their largest analysis

problems. -- The University of Missouri Bioinformatics Consortium is able to pursue

new channels of scientific discovery in chemistry, physics and the life

sciences with HPC supercomputing and storage solutions from SGI. With a

new 64-processor, 128GB SGI Altix 3700 system and an 8TB SGI(R)

InfiniteStorage TP9500 solution, university researchers and faculty can

drive groundbreaking studies with such leading applications as

Gaussian, Amber and VASP. Vital to the selection of SGI solutions was

SGI's superior performance and global shared-memory architecture. -- Sony DADC turned to SGI to significantly upgrade its Storage Area

Network (SAN) infrastructure and server systems to support production

of its new high-capacity Blu-ray Disc technology. The entertainment

technology giant purchased a SGI InfiniteStorage TP9700 4Gb RAID

controller and two 4Gb SAN switches to manage 8TB of storage on top of

the 4TB InfiniteStorage TP9300 solution already in place. Sony DADC

integrated both controllers in the same SAN with another existing 10TB

secondary storage installation, while adding nearly 17TB of more

secondary storage capacity. An upgrade of Sony DADC's license of SGI

InfiniteStorage Shared Filesystem CXFS will further enable seamless and

efficient data management as the company drives the Blu-ray Disc

initiative worldwide. To accommodate the additional workload, the

company also upgraded its existing SGI server platform from eight to 12

processors. Sony DADC upgraded its SGI infrastructure due to the

superior performance, reliability and scalability of SGI storage and

server solutions. SILICON GRAPHICS | The Source of Innovation and Discovery(TM) SGI, also known as Silicon Graphics, Inc., is a leader in high-performance computing, visualization and storage. SGI's vision is to provide technology that enables the most significant scientific and creative breakthroughs of the 21st century. Whether it's sharing images to aid in brain surgery, finding oil more efficiently, studying global climate, providing technologies for homeland security and defense or enabling the transition from analog to digital broadcasting, SGI is dedicated to addressing the next class of challenges for scientific, engineering and creative users. With offices worldwide, the company is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., and can be found on the Web at http://www.sgi.com. NOTE: Silicon Graphics, SGI, Altix, Tezro, XFS, the SGI cube and the SGI logo are registered trademarks, and Silicon Graphics Prism, NUMAflex, CXFS, SpeedShop, ProPack, and The Source of Innovation and Discovery are trademarks of Silicon Graphics, Inc., in the United States and/or other countries worldwide. Novell is a registered trademark, and SUSE is a trademark of Novell, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Intel and Itanium are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries. All other trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners. This news release contains forward-looking statements regarding the sale of products that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in such statements. The reader is cautioned not to rely unduly on these forward-looking statements, which are not a guarantee of future performance. Such risks and uncertainties include financial and contractual commitments, the installation and performance of hardware and software, reliance on performance of third- party partners, timely delivery of the system, acceptance of the system by the customer, and other risks detailed from time to time in the company's most recent SEC reports. SGI Contact: Caroline Japic, caroline@sgi.com, 650-933-7210;

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