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Eight SGI Customers Named as 2003 Computerworld Honors Laureates; Four Selected as Finalists
SGI customers around the world rely on SGI® high-performance computing (HPC) systems to solve their toughest problems in government and defense, sciences, manufacturing, energy, and media. Eight of these visionary SGI customers have been recognized this year by Computerworld magazine, which established the Computerworld Honors Collection in 1988 as a collaboration between the leaders of the information technology industry and the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. These eight Computerworld Honors Laureates were asked to contribute a case study to the Honors Collection. The 2003 collection, which will be archived in libraries, museums and academic and research institutions around the world, will serve as primary source material for scholars and as a resource for individuals who hope to use information technology to build solutions that benefit society. These case studies were donated in a formal medal presentation held in San Francisco on April 6. "Each year, Computerworld Honors identifies and recognizes individuals around the world whose visionary use of information technology produces and promotes positive social, economic and educational change," said Bob Carrigan, president and publisher of Computerworld. "The innovators represented in this year's collection have been recognized by the leading IT industry chairpersons as true revolutionaries in their fields." Bob Bishop, chairman and CEO of SGI and member of the Computerworld Honors Chairmen's Committee, nominated the eight SGI customers. Their case studies now become part of a collection of over 300 case studies in 10 categories from 33 countries. The eight SGI customers who contributed case studies are:
Computerworld Honors Finalists NASA Ames Research Center: Walter Brooks, chief of the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division and Steve Zornetzer, deputy director of Ames, submitted a case study titled "Chapman: 1,024-processor Single System Image." Running on an SGI® Origin® 3800 supercomputer, 1,000 parallel processors share a single memory image, reducing the complexity of programming scientific tasks that require enormous amounts of computer power, such as space shuttle design simulations. As stated in the case study, "The co-development project between NASA and SGI began in 1997. The partnership produced numerous innovations in systems and applications. The innovations made supercomputers easier to program while achieving higher levels of efficiency. It produced four first-of-a-kind machines: two became standard SGI product offerings; one was the prototype for a future product, and the other is the 1,024 processor Chapman system. Chapman is the first and largest of its kind--a 1,024-processor single-image shared-memory computer. All of these systems were used on mission critical projects within NASA. Systems that went on to become standard product offerings from SGI are in use at the Department of Energy (DoE), United States NAVY, Department of Defense (DoD), Boeing, and numerous other government and commercial installations." Ford Motor Company: Dr. Ren-Jye Yang, senior staff technical specialist, submitted a case study titled "MDO of Automotive Vehicle System for Passenger Safety and Customer Satisfaction." The overview of this case study reads: "A multi-disciplinary design optimization (MDO) methodology allows a major auto manufacturer to successfully integrate and balance conflicting design goals in parallel, creating better cars sooner while lowering costs of individual computer runs a thousand fold." The study notes, "An effective integration of HPC with MDO methodology, through coarse and fine-grained parallelism, can enable faster turnaround of MDO solution times. For instance, a crash simulation that used to take 27 hours and cost $5,200 to run on a Cray Y-MP supercomputer, runs today in one hour on a SGI® Origin® 3000 system and costs approximately $7.00. This dramatic cost/performance improvement is enabling new approaches like MDO to flourish." France Télévisions Publicité (FTP): Christophe Scherer, IT and technical director, submitted a case study called "Using Digital Technology to Revolutionize Delivery of Television Commercials." FTP summarized its submission as: "A complete central repository of 35,000 television advertisements, ranging from 10 seconds to 4 minutes, allows them to be sent electronically to remote broadcast locations, lowering costs, reducing errors, and allowing changes to be made right up to the last minute." Scherer also states in the case study, "The solution designed by SGI revolutionizes TV advertising delivery. The SGI solution is based on a hub-and-spoke model and similar to an edge-server architecture. It employs SGI Media Server™ for broadcast systems providing MPEG-2 ingest capabilities at the central facility in Paris. From there, content is distributed as video files to smaller SGI Media Server for broadcast systems, which provide playout services for the spots at the local transmission facilities…. Because of the open networking capabilities of SGI Media Server for broadcast, France Télévisions Publicité was able to utilize an existing network without purchasing hardware to convert physical interfaces." FTP now also uses an all-digital, disk-based architecture for commercial playout. It runs on an SGI® Origin® 3200 server with two Sony PetaSite™ systems, an SGI® CXFS™ shared filesystem, SGI® Origin® 2000 servers, SGI® DMF (Data Migration Facility) software, and other support equipment. The University of Manchester (U.K.): Dr. Nigel John, head of the Manchester Visualization Centre, submitted a case study titled "3D Volume Visualization in the Operating Room." He described the process: "Three-dimensional volumetric renderings of patient-specific data are delivered in real-time to the medical 'sharp-end,' projected on the operating room wall to ensure that the surgeon has the best available information during the surgery itself." Perhaps the most impressive part of the project is that the visualization of the data from the SGI® Onyx® 300 system is delivered to the operating room at the hospital, which is about one mile away. According to Dr. John, "The project owes its success to the use of HPC and other state-of-the-art equipment. The hospital has a latest generation CT (computed tomography) medical scanner. A patient scan consisting of up to 500 image slices, each containing 512 by 512 pixels is not uncommon. An SGI Onyx 300 visualization supercomputer at the Manchester Visualisation Centre is capable of processing a data set in excess of 130MB in real time. Using the graphics hardware on the supercomputer, a volume rendering technique can be applied to the CT data to produce high-resolution 3D renderings of the internal anatomy. We have written an easy-to-use application that allows the surgeon to interrogate and interact with the volume date. The application uses SGI OpenGL Volumizer, which helps to ensure that full advantage is taken of the graphics hardware. To provide the necessary remote visualization functionality, we have made use of SGI OpenGL Vizserver, which allows the contents of the frame buffer on the visualization supercomputer to be delivered across the computer network to a client workstation or PC."
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