SGI helps find solutions with a touch of reality

By ADAM GIFFORD

You are trying to discuss a complex scientific, engineering or creative problem.

You have the software on your computer to make dynamic models of the problem, but having a bunch of people leaning over your shoulder looking at a monitor doesn't make for a good meeting.

Imagine then projecting that data on to a 4-metre screen. Don't imagine it. Go to somewhere like the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and use its Silicon Graphics (SGI) "Reality Centre," a room with a 140-degree curved screen and $1 million in computing power.

Bill Trestrail, SGI managing director for New Zealand and Australia, said that in the United States and Europe, reality centres were being bought by car makers so they could do design reviews.

In Australia, the technology is being adopted by oil and gas companies, who assemble teams from different scientific disciplines in one room, communicating around a large data model such as a seismic survey, determining where the company should drill.

"It costs a million dollars a day to drill holes trying to find oil. If you can increase the chances of finding oil by people communicating, where previously they haven't, you get a faster payback," Mr Trestrail said.

Other applications include visualisation of molecular structures, modelling hydro dams and large civil engineering projects, allowing city councils to determine the effect of large new buildings on the existing skyline, and the ever-popular application, flight simulation.

SGI is boosting its representation here, promoting senior account manager Scott Houston to New Zealand regional manager.

Mr Trestrail said SGI had tightened its product line, selling Cray Computer and floating its Mips chip business, and was focusing on what it did best, big data management, visualisation and high performance computing. It has also invested heavily in Linux.

"SGI sees Linux as the fastest growing operating system in the world ... We believe the economics of Linux make it very attractive for software developers and we believe Linux will become a lot more mainstream in future," Mr Trestrail said.

SGI also plans to promote Intel's new IA 64 chip in its product line as a Linux-only zone. Mr Trestrail said the open source model of software development had big pluses for SGI.

"It means you have 10 million people maintaining the software for you without you paying for it. People come up with ideas, so the product continues to evolve."

SGI sees Linux as an investment in the future. Because Linux can be downloaded free from the internet, it is hard to measure its spread.

"When I talk to customers, they say we have no Linux here. When I talk to their database administrators, they say they have 40 Linux servers - they bought Windows NT and just loaded Linux."

Mr Trestrail said sales were strong for SGI's high end servers, graphics solutions and the new Origin 3000 servers, which feature a radical modular architecture.

"When IA 64 comes, you can just buy an IA 64 compute brick and plug it in."

That differed from clustering, where several machines were networked together. "This really is one machine so there is a single system image and memory is available to processors anywhere. That means the connections must be high speed, high bandwidth and low latency." SGI is using the modules to build Nasa a 1024 processor shared memory machine for scientific and technical applications.

SGI has formed an alliance with graphic and geographic information systems software specialist Intergraph, under which it will buy Intergraph's Zx10 Windows NT workstations and servers.

Intergraph will resell SGI's broad suite of products and services. The alliance will allow Intergraph to concentrate on software applications while continuing to provide leading edge hardware.