SAAD Hospital acquires high-performance computer from SGI

The award-winning Altix HPC server family leverages industry-standard components to offer the most value in high-end computing. SGI Altix incorporates cutting-edge technology that allows fast access to all data in the system's memory directly and efficiently, without having to move data through I/O or networking bottlenecks.

"Being the premier hospital in Saudi Arabia, Saad Hospital has always been among the first to embrace new technological innovations," said Karim El Alami, Chief Information Officer at Saad Hospital. "Our requirements centered on a Picture Archive and Communication System (PACS) that could withstand the pressures of increased radiology image traffic. SGI servers are easily the best performing servers in the industry, and hence were an obvious choice. SGI's Altix 350 is highly resilient and provides 24/7 non-stop operation, which is critical to ensuring the efficacy of our hospital operations."

Gilbert Soufan, General Manager, SGI Middle East and North Africa, said,

"Keeping with our reputation of setting the standards in high-performance computing, the system's advanced capabilities would allow Saad Hospital to transfer any number of radiology images, thereby facilitating the provisioning of faster and more efficient healthcare service to patients. The decision to deploy the SGI Altix will continue to reinforce Saad Hospital's reputation as one of the most advanced hospitals in the Arab world."

Scaling to 32 Intel® Itanium® 2 processors in a single platform, the Altix 350 leverages the powerful SGI® NUMAflex™ global shared-memory architecture to derive maximum application over 6.4 gigabytes per second of sustained I/O bandwidth.

"The Intel Itanium 2-Based solution offered to Saad Hospital by SGI is yet another example of our commitment to the healthcare industry in the region," said Samir Al-Schamma, Intel's General Manager for the Gulf Countries region.

"More than 50 percent of Global 100 companies depend on Itanium architecture-based solutions to run their business-critical applications. We are happy to partner with SGI on this significant project and look forward to further cooperation with SGI in this field."