Engineering Solutions Provider Hoff and Associates Joins SGI as Channel Partner

Nationally Recognized Leader in Delivering Engineering Solutions for the CAE Community Offers SGI Altix and SGI InfiniteStorage Systems as One-Stop Solution Shopping for Cluster and Shared Memory Computing

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (October 31, 2006) — SGI (NASDAQ: SGIC) today announced that Hoff and Associates, the preeminent high-performance compute (HPC) solutions provider for engineering, product development, and product testing, has joined the SGI Channel Partner program and is now offering SGI technology to its customers nationwide. Based in Plymouth, Mich., Hoff and Associates has extensive IT expertise, decade-plus experience, and deep background in nearly every compute-intensive Computer-Assisted Engineering (CAE) software application in use throughout the manufacturing industry. The company has a solid team of domain experts that specialize in the actual deployment of HPC systems optimized for an engineering department's specific applications to maximize system performance and increase throughput. Hoff and Associates will sell SGI® Altix® XE clusters, SGI® Altix® 4700 high performance, shared memory solutions, and well as SGI® InfiniteStorage systems. One of the many reasons the company is adding SGI to its sales portfolio is the ability to offer customers the combination of reliable clusters, HPC and storage - a complete turnkey SGI solution for the entire product development workflow.

"We have evaluated all the different solutions and SGI is very high-focused in our main market, which is the CAE industry." said Don Coburn, director of High-Performance Compute (HPC) Solutions, Hoff and Associates. "SGI has a lot of talent, a lot of experience and a lot of application background in the CAE market space, and their solutions have typically been tweaked, optimized and tailored to those applications. For instance, with Altix XE clusters, SGI has done some clever things, like delivering FFIO (flexible file I/O) thereby improving the overall performance of I/O intensive applications such as MSC.Nastran, Abaqus and ANSYS. That's what I like about SGI, they are continuously innovating at all levels the system level and the middleware level to create solutions aimed at improving the CAE end users' productivity."

Hoff and Associates' primary business is providing cluster and high-performance systems for engineering, consulting, and advanced engineering services, and of that, the biggest portion is CAE. What truly distinguishes the company as an HPC provider is that they very thoroughly know and run just about every CAE code in the market today on a regular basis and can troubleshoot issues related to site installation. They do this for their own service needs, and because these are the codes their customers will be using on the HPC systems in a production environment. The CAE applications include the best known in the industry spanning multiple CAE disciplines: Computational Fluid Dynamics and Structural Mechanics including explicit (Crash type) codes as well as general purpose Finite Element Analysis codes. These codes include MSC.Nastran, Abaqus, ANSYS, FLUENT, STAR-CD, EXA Powerflow, LS-DYNA, Pamcrash & Radioss).

"Each code has its own very specific needs and quirks and nuances, in terms of high speed computing, and knowing how it's best implemented on these cluster systems -- and also knowing the specific needs of the code -- is key," added Coburn. "For instance, LS-DYNA is very CPU-intensive, but not really memory or I/O intensive, Abaqus, on the other hand, is extremely I/O intensive, very memory and memory bandwidth-intensive, and requires a different hardware to run optimally. We're pleased to offer SGI systems because our customers look for price-performance. Today, Altix XE clusters provide the best bang for the buck, compared to anything else that we've looked at. And that's based on benchmark after benchmark after benchmark, and every CAE application that we implement. In the last few months we ran two of the most extensive benchmarks that we ever had and Altix XE beat our traditional Opteron offerings hands down on every single application."

In addition to the SGI Altix XE cluster environment, which runs Dual-core Intel® Xeon® processors, Hoff and Associates will offer the SGI Altix family of servers with shared memory architecture running Intel® Itanium® 2 processors. SGI Altix systems all run Red Hat or Novell® SUSE® Linux® Enterprise Server 9 environments.

SGI core technologies of high-performance servers and clusters, and data management and storage solutions are designed to meet the challenges in all phases of today's manufacturing process including product concept/design, styling, prototyping, simulation, testing, and packaging. SGI solutions are deployed with a variety of leading industrial companies and manufacturing research organizations worldwide delivering state-of-the-art technological solutions to provide customers with a competitive advantage in today's global marketplace. These include market segments as diverse as automotive, aerospace, defense and intelligence, consumer goods, electronics, medical devices, power generation, chemical processing, and heavy industry among others.

'We have the best of both worlds by partnering with SGI," concluded Coburn. "We can offer Altix XE distributed systems for codes that distribute very well, we can add the traditional Altix offerings optimized for shared memory, and combine them together in one environment to offer the best solution for every environment. Being able to add storage products on top of that is very compelling. In the past we had to go to multiple vendors for computing and storage but now we can one-stop-shop and have a complete SGI solution for everything. This partnership also allows us to deliver a name-brand SGI system for not a whole lot more than a traditional white box. We can now offer next-business-day response on hardware issues, and that's another key advantage to working with SGI. Our white box suppliers couldn't offer that level of on-site support. For a customer, it becomes a no-brainer."

"The manufacturing industry heavily relies on CAE applications to enhance the product development process and Hoff and Associates is known throughout the industry for architecting optimal compute systems using their thorough understanding of those codes and industry requirements to achieve smooth implementation - all critical elements for improved workflow productivity," said Himanshu Misra, segment manager, Engineering Analysis, SGI.

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