Altix Again Trumps Competition in Application Performance

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (October 15, 2004)—Silicon Graphics (NYSE: SGI) today announced that its SGI® Altix® server has once again proven dominant against key competitors including Hewlett Packard. In recent database benchmark tests, a mid-range Altix system set a new performance record for stand-alone, eight-processor servers. The results show that a mid-range Altix system offers leading performance for users who depend on complex databases for their technical, scientific and creative applications.

The Altix system's record-breaking TPC Benchmark™ H (TPC-H) 300GB benchmark result was achieved on an eight-processor SGI Altix server. With this new record, Altix surpasses non-clustered results posted by other leading vendors including those for an eight-processor Hewlett Packard® server and a 16-processor Unisys® server - as well as the recent posting for an eight-processor, dual-node Dell® cluster running Oracle® Database 10g.

The industry standard Transaction Processing Performance Council's TPC-H benchmark is an important measure of database performance for high-performance computing (HPC) customers because it simulates the complex database tasks that lie at the core of many HPC customer workflows. The benchmark reflects decision support systems that examine large volumes of data, execute queries with a high degree of complexity, and give answers to critical business questions.

The published result of 8827.5 QphH@300GB sets two records for the TPC-H 300GB scale factor benchmark. It is the highest non-clustered result, and the highest eight-processor result.

The test configuration is based on Intel® Itanium® 2 processors running IBM® DB2 Universal Database™ (UDB), and SUSE® Linux® Enterprise Server.

Performance Results

Throughput - 8827.5 QphH@300GB
Availability Date - December 15, 2004; Hardware available now
System - SGI Altix 3700 8P
CPU - 8 Intel Itanium 2 processors at 1.5 GHz with 6MB L3 cache
Storage - 8 SGI® InfiniteStorage TP9300 each with 14 73 GB drives
System Memory - 64GB
Database - IBM DB2 UDB 8.2
OS - SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9

Since its debut, SGI Altix has consistently shattered industry-standard benchmark records, regularly outpacing competing systems from HP, Sun and others. For instance, SGI Altix continues to dominate the respected STREAM list of the 20 fastest systems in terms of memory bandwidth http://www.cs.virginia.edu/stream/top20/Bandwidth.html . STREAM is designed to work with extremely large data sets, thus replicating the computing conditions created by large, vector-style applications.

The Altix system's latest performance victory demonstrates the advantage Altix brings to mission critical applications in areas such as homeland security, bioinformatics and energy exploration. The open, standards-based Altix line is designed specifically to meet the demanding requirements of high performance computing (HPC) environments.

Availability

Scalable SGI Altix systems are available in server configurations of 4 to 512 processors per node, and extended into cluster configurations using industry standard interconnects. For customers demanding even larger Altix systems, SGI plans to support configurations of 2048 per node and more processors over time. Additional Altix system technical and availability information is posted on:
http://www.sgi.com/products/servers/altix

About the TPC-H Benchmark

The TPC Benchmark H (TPC-H) is a decision support benchmark. It consists of a suite of business oriented ad-hoc queries and concurrent data modifications. The queries and the data populating the database have been chosen to have broad industry-wide relevance. This benchmark illustrates decision support systems that examine large volumes of data, execute queries with a high degree of complexity, and give answers to critical business questions.

The performance metric reported by TPC-H is called the TPC-H Composite Query-per-Hour Performance Metric (QphH@Size), and reflects multiple aspects of the capability of the system to process queries. These aspects include the selected database size against which the queries are executed, the query processing power when queries are submitted by a single stream, and the query throughput when queries are submitted by multiple concurrent users. The TPC-H Price/Performance metric is expressed as $/QphH@Size.The TPC is located on the Web at www.tpc.org.

SILICON GRAPHICS | The Source of Innovation and Discovery™

SGI, also known as Silicon Graphics, Inc. (NYSE: SGI), 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