SGI® Altix® ICE 8400 Sets Computational Fluid Dynamics World Record on ANSYS FLUENT

Industry's Most Scalable Integrated InfiniBand Cluster Runs ANSYS® FLUENT® 12.0 at Unprecedented 4,092 Cores

FREMONT, Calif. — June 1, 2010 — SGI (NASDAQ: SGI), a global leader in HPC and data center solutions, today announced that SGI Altix ICE 8400 set a world record for scalability running the 111 million cell ANSYS FLUENT 12.0 benchmark. The benchmark was executed on the integrated bladed cluster with 4,092 cores of Intel® Xeon® X5670 processors running at 2.93 GHz with Novell's SUSE® Linux Enterprise 11 operating system.

SGI Altix ICE 8400 demonstrated unmatched parallel scaling up to 3,072 cores with a rating of 1,333.3 standard benchmark jobs per day. It also proved the ability to run ANSYS FLUENT on all 4,092 cores. To date, no other cluster has reported ANSYS FLUENT benchmark results above 2,048 cores, which was also posted by SGI. The ANSYS FLUENT benchmark performance increase was achieved with the help of SGI® MPI PerfBoost.

"This world record demonstrates the superior scalability and computing power of the SGI system with SGI MPI PerfBoost," said Christian Tanasescu, vice president of software engineering at SGI. "Part of our recently announced ProPack™ 7 suite, SGI's MPI PerfBoost allows technical applications written for other MPI implementations to take advantage of the performance, robustness and scalability of SGI Message Passage Toolkit (MPI) at runtime without recompiling."

ANSYS FLUENT software is used for engineering simulations involving fluid flow problems and is based on a numerical technique called computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The ANSYS® (NASDAQ: ANSS) suite of integrated multiphysics helps organizations to virtually test their product designs against a variety of real-world operating conditions. As product designs become more complex, the ability to solve higher-fidelity models is critical to reduce the need for expensive physical testing, yielding results within days instead of weeks and enabling engineers to consider multiple design ideas.

"SGI has once again pushed the boundary to demonstrate ANSYS FLUENT scalability at this extreme level," said Josh Fredberg, vice president of marketing at ANSYS. "We invest heavily in HPC performance tuning in order to deliver scalability that our customers need for their highest fidelity engineering simulations. Our technical collaboration with SGI is a key part of our success and helps us deliver HPC technology that is second to none."

The Altix ICE 8400 ANSYS FLUENT benchmark is posted at: http://www.ansys.com/111M-Benchmark.

©2010 SGI. SGI is a registered trademark of Silicon Graphics International Corp. or its subsidiaries in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective holders.