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| Life-saving medicines and cancer treatments. Safer, more efficient cars and planes. The most extensive computer simulations ever done on HIV protease. New generations of space exploration vehicles. High-resolution, interactive visualisations of vast oil and gas deposits. The first digital prototype of the world's largest passenger jet. Groundbreaking climate change studies. Eight consecutive years of Academy Award®-winning special effects. New sustainable forms of energy. The first atomic-level simulation of a complete, functioning organism. Detailed studies - including debris analyses and structural tests - enabling the NASA Space Shuttle programme to return to space after the Columbia accident.
The list goes on and on. Because throughout its history, SGI has enabled countless breakthroughs in the myriad industries and scientific disciplines pursued by customers dedicated to changing the world. As our CEO Bo Ewald said in celebration of this remarkable heritage, "For 25 years, the important work undertaken by our customers shows that SGI's persistent drive to enable historic innovation pays real-life dividends to people in every corner of the world. Our mission now is to keep inventing the solutions that will help the next generation of innovators accelerate the forward progress of science, industry and entertainment over the next quarter century."
As you will see from this issue of SGI Magazine, the pace of our innovation and that of our customers is showing no sign of letting up. We showcase the work of Professor Stephen Hawking's UK COSMOS consortium in their investigations into all aspects of cosmology - from unravelling the secrets of dark matter to galactic archaeology. Also featured are three further case studies highlighting the breadth of use of our technology, for applications ranging from online retailing and non-stop Oracle order processing to weather and climate forecasting. In addition you will find news of our very latest Visual Supercomputing solutions (launched at Supercomputing 2007), and comprehensive information about SGI® Altix® ICE – our next-generation platform that brings all the advantages of SGI's expertise in HPC to a tightly integrated, cool-running blade solution, and has received a fabulous reception from our customers and prospects worldwide since its launch earlier in the year. Completing the picture are our latest SGI® InfiniteStorage NEXIS NAS family; our bundled solutions for digital content management; and a more detailed look into the future of "The Performance Solutions Company" from our CEO Bo Ewald. We hope these stories will encourage you to join us as one of that "next generation of innovators". Tim Butchart |
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| A history of reinvention | |
| 1983 Geometry Engine® – the first specialist processor designed to accelerate the geometric computations needed to display 3D images | |
| 1987 The industry's first workstation based on a RISC processor | |
| 1991 The IRIS® Graphics Library | |
| 1994 SGI® Reality Center® – the world's first collaborative visualisation centre | |
| 1999 CXFS™ – the industry's first SAN shared file system | |
| 2000 The NUMA server architecture | |
| 2001 SGI is the first system vendor to open source a file system, XFS® | |
| 2002 Visual Area Networking | |
| 2003 The award-winning SGI Altix® combines HPC and Linux®. SGI® InfiniteStorage solutions also introduced | |
| 2004 NASA's 10,240-processor Columbia supercomputer – the world's most powerful computer – is built and deployed in just 120 days | |
| 2005 The industry's first native server-to-storage InfiniBand solution is delivered for the SGI® InfiniteStorage TP9700 disk array | |
| 2006 SGI® RASC™ delivers the power of a supercomputer in a single blade. SGI® Altix® XE factory-integrated clusters introduced. SGI Altix system runs a single instance of Linux across 1,024 processors | |
| 2007 "Green HPC" becomes a reality with SGI® Altix® ICE – a powerful bladed system, purpose-built for HPC performance while helping customers achieve industry-leading space and energy efficiencies. Visual Supercomputing also introduced |
