MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Feb. 24 -- Silicon Graphics today announced that the computing department of Skoda Auto, a car producer (part of VW Group) and leading Czech manufacturing company, has selected SGI® supercomputing and storage technologies to solve the massive computer-aided engineering (CAE) computation challenges associated with modern car development and design.

SGI high-performance computing systems leverage the world's most advanced shared-memory architecture, enabling technical and scientific customers to address complex problems and to compute vast amounts of data faster and in a more coherent manner than on conventional distributed-memory systems.

To meet the Skoda technical computing department's ever-growing computer technology needs, SGI has provided an open and flexible solution that includes an SGI® Altix® 3000 supercluster powered by 96 Intel® Itanium® 2 processors and 192GB memory. The Prague-based car maker's installation also includes a 16TB storage system, SGI® InfiniteStorage TP9300 Fibre Channel RAID array, integrated into a storage area network environment enabling powerful access for all other computing servers and pre- and post-processing workstations.

The Altix® supercluster will be used mainly for car crash analysis with PAM-CRASH® from ESI Group and fluid dynamics analysis with FLUENT® from Fluent Inc. This new system will provide Skoda Auto with additional processing power of close to 500 GFLOPS and allow engineers to reduce processing times, thereby optimizing decisions concerning car development and design efficiency, quality and safety.

The SGI Altix family already has been adopted by many major research and industry organizations around the world. The Altix system combines three powerful technologies -- the most advanced Intel® processor family, a 64-bit open-source Linux® operating environment and the SGI® NUMAflex(TM) shared-memory architecture -- creating a solution that enables supercomputing-class performance and helps solve the most challenging problems of the 21st century. Since its launch last year, the family of Intel Itanium 2 processor-based SGI Altix 3000 systems has consistently shattered scalability and performance records on high-performance computing industry-standard benchmarks.

"Skoda Auto has decided to use Linux based computing systems in car design. This confirms the readiness of such a solution for the mission-critical areas and applications of industrial enterprises," said Michal Klimes, managing director for Central and Eastern Europe, SGI. "The usage of such systems built upon standards improve significantly the return of our customers' technology investments and extend the lifecycle of rapidly evolving technology."

For further information about the SGI Altix 3000 family of servers and superclusters, visit www.sgi.com/servers/altix/.

Silicon Graphics - The Source of Innovation and Discovery(TM)

SGI, also known as Silicon Graphics, Inc., is the world's 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 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 www.sgi.com.

NOTE: Silicon Graphics, SGI, Altix, the SGI cube and the SGI logo are registered trademarks and NUMAflex and The Source of Innovation and Discovery are trademarks of Silicon Graphics, Inc., in the United States and/or other countries worldwide. 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 several countries. All other trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.