Ford Research and Design Centers Increase Productivity with SGI Technology

Ford HPC Facilities in Michigan and Germany Apply SGI Storage and Server Solutions to Challenging Automotive Design Questions

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (Dec. 12, 2005) — Silicon Graphics (OTC: SGID) announces that Ford Motor Company has purchased technology for use at three of its high performance computing (HPC) center locations to increase productivity in research and automotive design. SGI® InfiniteStorage solutions and SGI® Altix® servers are shortening data access times and compute runs for a variety of CAE, CFD, and FEA applications used by Ford engineers and scientists to refine vehicle designs in areas such as crashworthiness, combustion efficiency, and passenger comfort and safety.

In May Ford completed the purchase of the following SGI storage and compute technologies:

* Research Computer Systems Department, Dearborn, Michigan. The Department, which is part of the Ford Research and Innovation Center, uses SGI® InfiniteStorage Shared Filesystem CXFS™ to give scientists instant concurrent access to files on SGI Altix and SGI® Origin® compute platforms, eliminating the need for downloading or copying data. Ford is now exploring the possibility of adding its Sun and IBM servers to the CXFS environment. SGI Data Migration Facility (DMF) automatically migrates data from high-speed disk to nearline and tape storage.
* Numerically Intensive Computing Center (NIC), Dearborn, Michigan. An SGI® Altix® 3700 server with a terabyte of memory and powered by 256 Intel® Itanium® 2 processors running the Linux® operating environment is the Center’s general-purpose computational workhorse for engineers running computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and finite element analysis (FEA) studies for Ford models currently under development. It provides both distributed processing and a large shared-memory SMP environment.
* Numerically Intensive Computing Center, Merkenich, Germany. At this facility, an extension of the NIC, Ford engineers in Germany access a 128-processor SGI Altix 3700 server with 512GB of memory to run design studies.

“Ford’s selection of SGI HPC and storage technology is a validation of our core strengths,” said Brian Samuels, senior vice president, Global Sales, Service & Marketing, SGI. “Our relationship with Ford and other companies gives us the insight to develop practical solutions that contribute to customers’ overall ability and power to innovate.”

SILICON GRAPHICS | The Source of Innovation and Discovery™
SGI, also known as Silicon Graphics, Inc. (OTC: SGID), is a leader in high-performance computing, visualization and storage. SGI’s vision is to provide technology that enables the most significant scientific and creative breakthroughs of the 21st century. Whether it’s sharing images to aid in brain surgery, finding oil more efficiently, studying global climate change, providing technologies for homeland security and defense or enabling the transition from analog to digital broadcasting, SGI is dedicated to addressing the next class of challenges for scientific, engineering and creative users. With offices worldwide, the company is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., and can be found on the Web at www.sgi.com.

Silicon Graphics, SGI, Altix, Origin, the SGI cube and the SGI logo are registered trademarks and CXFS and The Source of Innovation and Discovery are trademarks of Silicon Graphics, Inc., in the United States and/or other countries worldwide. Intel and Itanium are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. All other trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.

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