http://www.sgi.com/Headlines/1995/May/super_computers.html (Einblicke ins Internet, 10/1995)

Silicon Graphics Takes Lead in Departmental Supercomputers

With Twice the Market Share of its Closest Competitor, Company Unveils Even Faster Supercomputing Systems

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California (May 3, 1995) -- According to data compiled by market research firms, Silicon Graphics, Inc. (NYSE:SGI) is the leading vendor of departmental supercomputers, the fastest growing sector of the high-performance computing market. Silicon Graphics' rapid market share growth has been attributed to its powerful and affordable high-performance symmetric multiprocessing systems,visualization technologies and breadth of supercomputing applications. The company also announced that it is increasing the speed of its POWER CHALLENGE supercomputer and POWER Onyx graphics supercomputer products by an additional 20 percent.

Prominent research firms International Data Corporation (IDC) and Smaby Group, Inc. both have noted that Silicon Graphics has captured more than one-third of the 1994 mid-range, high-performance computing market. In preliminary 1994 estimates, IDC found Silicon Graphics leading with a 36 percent share of a $745 million dollar total market. The Smaby Group estimates that revenues in this segment total $943 million with Silicon Graphics owning 37 percent of the market. Both firms report that Silicon Graphics has approximately twice the market share of its nearest competitor.

"Silicon Graphics entered the supercomputing market committed to delivering an entirely new paradigm for deployable supercomputing," said Thomas A. Jermoluk, Silicon Graphics' president and chief operating officer. "Our affordable systems based on the MIPS R8000 processor have brought mainstream industry users unprecedented access to supercomputing power -- which in turn, is revolutionizing product design and reducing development cycles and costs."

"Supercomputer capabilities that were once available to a select group of scientists and engineers are now available to a very wide range of users," said Christopher G. Willard, manager of High Performance Technologies at IDC, Mountain View. "Silicon Graphics' strategy is to leverage advances in component technology and systems architecture to redefine the way supercomputer capability is accessed and used by the mainstream scientific community."

"High-end symmetrical multi-processing systems, notably Silicon Graphics' POWER CHALLENGE and POWER Onyx products, have been the key catalyst for growth in the departmental supercomputing segment," said Gary Smaby, president of Smaby Group, Inc. "In just the past two years, Silicon Graphics has muscled its way into the marketshare leadership slot of this fast growing segment and now enjoys a well-deserved perception as the hottest newcomer to the HPC arena."

Faster POWER CHALLENGE and POWER Onyx Systems

Also today, Silicon Graphics announced it will accelerate the performance of its already record-setting POWER CHALLENGE and POWER Onyx systems by introducing a 90MHz version of the MIPS® R8000 microprocessor to these high-performance product lines. The 90MHz R8000 CPU out-performs other RISC processors on vector supercomputing applications by streaming floating point data directly from the secondary cache. Representing the second upgrade in the past year for the POWER CHALLENGE and POWER Onyx product lines, the new processor offers 20 percent more performance over previous systems.

These more powerful systems offer up to 6.48 GFLOPs of processing power -- a full GFLOP faster than current Silicon Graphics' systems. The new processor is fully compatible with existing applications and with Silicon Graphics systems based on the earlier 75MHz MIPS R8000 processors, and permits a seamless upgrade path. The 90MHz R8000 processors are available immediately for the POWER CHALLENGE and POWER Onyx systems at no increase in price.

"At BIOSYM, we remain very impressed with the POWER CHALLENGE," said Jon Hurley, manager of key technologies, at BIOSYM Technologies, Inc., a leading developer of computational chemistry applications. "This performance increase confirms Silicon Graphics' commitment to delivering excellent performance standards. Scientists investing in BIOSYM's software on Silicon Graphics hardware will be assured that they have made a sound, long-term decision."

Visual Supercomputing

With its POWER Onyx graphics supercomputer, Silicon Graphics has also taken the lead in integrating the industry's fastest graphics in a supercomputing environment based on the R8000 processor. The POWER Onyx system's design reflects the changing nature of supercomputer applications, which have have evolved from traditional batch processing to interactive sessions encompassing visualization.

The POWER CHALLENGE and POWER Onyx product lines are supported by more than 2,000 third-party applications within Silicon Graphics' software catalog. Among these is a large library of traditional supercomputing applications that has been optimized for Silicon Graphics systems, including Ansys' ANSYS, BIOSYM Technologies' Discover, and MacNeal Schwindler's MSC/NASTRAN. These and other leading application developers are rearchitecting their products to optimize the Silicon Graphics model for interactive supercomputing.

Silicon Graphics also leads in 1994 supercomputer installations with 54 new sites worldwide according to the November 1994 "Top 500 Supercomputer Sites" summary by research professors Jack Dongarra, University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Hans W. Meuer and Erich Strohmaier of the University of Mannheim. Silicon Graphics supercomputing systems are deployed by the top research and development laboratories, as well as a growing number of leading corporations. Installations include the National Center of Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, BMW, Bristol Meyers Squibb and Texaco.

Silicon Graphics, Inc. is the leading manufacturer of high-performance visual computing systems. The company delivers interactive three-dimensional graphics, digital media and multiprocessing supercomputing technologies to technical, scientific and creative professionals. Its subsidiary, MIPS Technologies, Inc., designs and licenses the industry's leading RISC processor technology for the computer systems and embedded control markets. Silicon Graphics has offices worldwide and headquarters in Mountain View, California.

Silicon Graphics and the Silicon Graphics logo are registered trademarks, and POWER CHALLENGE and POWER Onyx are trademarks, of Silicon Graphics, Inc. MIPS is a registered trademark and R8000 is a trademark of MIPS Technologies, Inc. ANSYS is a trademark of Ansys, Inc. Discover is a trademark of BIOSYM Technologies, Inc. NASTRAN is a registered trademark of NASA. MSC/NASTRAN is a trademark of MacNeal-Schwindler Corporation.

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