Altix® UV 1000 Shatters SPEC® Performance Records; Runs Java 82 Percent Faster Than Nearest Competitors

FREMONT, Calif. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — July 19, 2010 — SGI (NASDAQ: SGI), a global leader in HPC and data center solutions, today announced that the SGI Altix UV 1000 system achieved two world records for performance on the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation’s SPECjbb2005® benchmark, an industry-standard measurement of Java-based application performance. Altix UV 1000 easily outperformed systems from Fujitsu, Oracle/Sun, ScaleMP and HP.

Altix UV 1000 championed its nearest competitors in two important metrics: ultimate throughput (Business Operations per second or BOPS) and Single Java Virtual Machine (JVM) performance. Complete SPECjbb2005 results are posted at www.spec.org.

• SGI Altix UV 1000, with 256 cores and 128 JVMs, beat ScaleMP, its nearest competitor, by 82 percent in Java performance with throughput of 12,665,917 BOPS using Oracle JRockit.
• SGI Altix UV 1000, with 256 cores, beat Fujitsu/Sun, its nearest competitor, by 60 percent with a single Oracle Java HotSpot JVM performance of 2,818,350 BOPS.

In addition, SGI Altix UV 1000 with only 48 cores running a single Oracle Java HotSpot JVM attained 1,080,399 BOPS, the smallest configuration that achieved a throughput higher than a million BOPS.¹

“Altix UV’s unprecedented performance directly translates into meaningful business benefits for a wide range of multi-tier enterprise applications based on Java Virtual Machines,” said Christian Tanasescu, vice president, software engineering at SGI. “Able to easily scale-up and out depending on business demands, these unprecedented SPECjbb2005 results prove Altix UV can lead in the Internet space.”

The throughput and scalability achieved demonstrate the capability of Altix UV to sustain a large number of concurrently parallel user sessions, executing transactions against an increasing number of warehouses. Applications that would benefit from this demonstrated performance include Internet, trading and financials, online auctions, social networking, Web mail, wikis, ERP and CRM in SAP and Oracle applications, among others.

Two Altix UV 1000 configurations were used: one server powered by 32 eight-core Intel® Xeon® X7560 processors and the second by eight six-core Intel® Xeon® X7542 processors. The Altix UV servers ran the high performance Oracle JRockit® 6.0 and Oracle Java HotSpot® 6.0 Java Virtual Machines (JVMs).

“SGI continues to aggressively push the boundaries of performance with Altix UV based on the Intel® Xeon® 7500 processor series as evidenced by these record-breaking SPEC benchmark results,” said Rajeeb Hazra, general manager of high performance computing at Intel. “Intel and SGI have collaborated closely on developing Altix UV, and we are excited to see our mutual efforts bring new levels of performance to end-customers using Java-based applications.”

There is a growing need with Java-based applications, which are fixtures in most enterprises, for reliable, scalable servers in entry-level, mid-range and high-end configurations. At every level of the enterprise, Altix UV allows organizations to extend their infrastructures without dramatically increasing the footprint of server resources.

• Business applications can use a single JVM to scale-up on a many-core Altix UV 1000 system while enjoying the simplified administrative benefits of operating on only one instance of the Linux® OS.
• Enterprises can rely on a single Altix UV server to support several business transactions or batch runs. With incremental batch processing needs, entry-level and mid-range servers can scale-out using multiple JVMs to meet the growing demand.

With the capability to both scale-up and scale-out, organizations can leverage Altix UV’s flexible, high-throughput architecture to run both distributed and memory-intensive business applications. Altix UV efficiently scales-out when multiple JVMs demand scalability to maintain a faster response time for web applications. Altix UV scales-up with only a single JVM on a many-core, large single system image, making it an ideal platform for multi-threaded Java applications in one box.

Available as a small, mid-range system, or a densely configured high performance server, Altix UV is built on SGI's unique shared memory architecture, which allows even large databases to be held entirely in memory, enabling fast data access for optimal application performance.

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