Silicon Graphics Inc. lays added emphasis on oil and gas sector

The breakthrough performance highlights of SGI's Altix 3000 range were presented to oil and gas industry representatives by officials from SGI and Emirates Computers, distributors for SGI products in the UAE, at a recent 'SGI Technology Day Seminar' held in Abu Dhabi.

"Abu Dhabi is indeed a very strategic market for the oil and gas industry in the country. Hence we felt that it was crucial to formally introduce the product in the city, in a bid to further develop our presence. The new SGI Altix 3000 range of servers and superclusters represent a remarkable achievement over existing competing systems, with a performance proven to be higher by several times. For the first time, it allows users to utilize a single Linux image to scale across 64 processors, against the standard 8 processors in most systems," said Gilbert Soufan, Territory Manager Middle East, SGI. "The capability is achieved through SGI's NUMAflex supercomputing architecture, Intel's 64-bit Itanium 2 processors and the open source operating system."

"As part of our new strategic plan for the Middle East, we are bringing the revolutionary Altix products to the region, offering the high-end market leading edge tools that can dramatically enhance performance and scalability," added Soufan. "These systems are ideally suited for sectors like oil and gas. An oil company wishing to simulate huge reservoir models, which are commonplace in the Middle East, will directly benefit from the efficient scalability of the Altix. Unlike the clusters of PCs, the Altix performance can scale to a much higher number of processors than a cluster of PCs," concluded Soufan.

"The Altix range of servers and superclusters triggers breakthrough performance with open source computing, representing a dramatic advance for technical users such as oil technocrats and scientists," said Soufan. "Altix superclusters aims to dramatically reduce the time and resources required to run technical applications by managing extremely large data sets in a single, system-wide, shared memory space. The combination of the NUMAflex architecture and Intel's highly advanced microprocessors leads to powerful price/performance breakthroughs in every measurable category."

Tony Abou Jawad, Technical Computing Manager, Emirates Computers, said that the availability of Altix 3000 systems in the Middle East would empower several organizations to go in for a technological upgrade in the interest of the company's overall performance and bottom-line.

"At a time when periodic technology upgrade has become crucial, Altix 3000 servers provide an opportunity to acquire next generation systems that are several times more powerful and versatile than most other systems," said Abou Jawad. "SGI has been a leader in providing industry-leading solutions to technical and specialist professionals. The supercomputing architecture incorporated in Altix 3000 systems brings to the region cutting technology designed to make a real difference in performance and scalability."

"Emirates Computers is pleased to offer SGI's breakthrough technology to top-end users in the region," added Abou Jawad. "As a pioneering technology company, we feel proud to be associated with the launch of such a prestigious product as Altix. We are confident that the region's oil sector in particular will be keen to draw benefit from the new systems."