SGI® Surpasses HP, IBM and Sun in Benchmarked Performance and Scalability

SGI® (NASDAQ:SGI) today announced that the SGI® Altix® 4700 platform, powered by Dual-Core Intel® Itanium® Processor 9040 (1.6GHz), outperformed top competitors including HP, IBM and Sun in all relevant Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) benchmarks for performance and scalability. The SGI world records were recently achieved at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Garching, Germany, and prove SGI to be the leading single-system image (SSI) platform in the world, surpassing competitor performance by more than five times in some cases.

“SGI Altix outperformed HP, IBM and Sun,” said Mark J. Barrenechea, president and CEO of SGI. “Our customers require the fastest compute and storage systems possible. For floating point arithmetic, we were five times faster than IBM, and for Java, we were four times faster than Sun. SGI is pleased with setting these world records in very relevant technology areas.”

SGI Altix 4700’s dominance in the three SPEC benchmarks illustrates that:

• SGI is more than five times faster than its next closest SSI competitor in the SPECfp_rate_base2006 floating point performance benchmark. Altix 4700 proved 5.7 times faster than the Sun SPARC Enterprise 9000, its next closest SSI competitor; IBM and HP products trailed further behind.
• SGI performed over four times better in the SPECint_rate_base2006 integer performance benchmark. Altix 4700 proved 4.3 times faster than the Sun product, its next closest SSI competitor.
• SGI outperforms IBM by almost three times in Java performance with SPECjbb2005 benchmark. Altix 4700 is the leader in Java performance as measured by SPECjbb2005, outperforming IBM by 2.8 times.
• SGI has five times higher aggregate memory bandwidth than its next closest competitors. Altix 4700 has the highest aggregate memory bandwidth in the world, five times higher than its next closest competitors, NEC and IBM.

“The results of these SPEC benchmarks are impressive, and SGI Altix has proven to be a powerhouse among scale-up architectures for some of the most complex real-world HPC applications in the world,” said Steve Conway, IDC’s research vice president of HPC. “For example, one Fortune 500 company we recently visited reserves Altix for the firm's toughest jobs while assigning other work to standard clusters. These SPEC benchmarks are an absolute home run and solidify Altix’s position as a leading platform in its space.”

SGI Altix is a large, shared-memory SSI architecture that powers some of the most important systems in the world, facilitating research in such fields as global warming, fraud detection and homeland security. The SGI benchmarking experts used an SSI node with 1024 Itanium cores and 4TB of memory with Novell’s SuSE Linux® Enterprise 10 operating environment to achieve these results in three SPEC benchmarks: SPECjbb2005, SPECint_rate_base2006 and SPECfp_rate_base2006.

Complete SPECjbb2005, SPECint_rate2006 and SPECfp_rate2006 results are available at:

http://www.spec.org/jbb2005/results/res2009q3/jbb2005-20090727-00756.html

http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2009q3/cpu2006-20090802-08313.html

http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2009q3/cpu2006-20090802-08312.html

For more information about SGI Altix 4700 please visit: http://www.sgi.com/products/servers/altix/4000/.

About SGI

SGI® is a global leader in large-scale clustered computing, high-performance storage, HPC, data center enablement and services. SGI is focused on helping customers solve their most demanding business and technology challenges. Visit www.sgi.com for more information.

© 2009 SGI. SGI and Altix are registered trademarks of Silicon Graphics International Corp. All other trademarks are property of their respective holders.

SPEC, SPECint, SPECfp and SPECjbb are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Competitive results from www.spec.org as of August 28, 2009.