The Hindu : Business : Visual computing solution for research from Silicon Graphics

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, May 05, 2005

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Visual computing solution for research from Silicon Graphics

Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE: How do you bridge the gap between the speed of the human mind and the ever-increasing speed of computer systems?

One way is to present complex computational analysis as images rather than as numbers. The California-based Silicon Graphics has chosen this path to offer a `visual computing' solution for such crunch-intensive tasks as seismic research, drug discovery or computer-aided engineering. And to make the offering more attractive to the scientific and academic community, it has based its latest range of Prism visualisation systems on the open source Linux operating system.

The range, which becomes available worldwide including India this week, includes an entry level machine machine in an interesting new form factor: a `deskside' computer — that is somewhere between a desktop work station and a rack mounted system: In other words you park the computer on the floor beside you and work with its monitor atop the desk. The Silicon Graphics India (SGI) Managing Director, Prasad Medury, told The Hindu in a special telephonic briefing from Mumbai on Monday that Prism was the world's first visual computer product line based on 64-bit Linux and built with commercial off-the-shelf components like the Intel Itanium-2 processor and the ATI graphics accelerator. The architecture however was SGI's own — similar to their high end `Altix' range.

The Prism systems scaled up from two graphic pipelines even in the two-chip entry deskside machine that was priced at just under $10,000 to 16 pipelines and 256 processors in the top-of-the-line $200,000-plus "Extreme'' model, with two configurations, "Power'' and "Team'' in between. Mr. Medury saw a good opportunity in India in the high-end of educational and scientific institutions — not just the IITs but many emerging private and state level engineering institutions, who are increasingly doing cutting edge R&D work that demand high performance computing muscle.

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