DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / AUGUST 11, 2003; VOL. 2 NO. 32    ( Table of Contents )

Applications:

SGI DELIVERS INTERACTIVE ENVIRONMENTS OVER OPTICAL NETWORKS

SGI, the pioneer in Visual Area Networking (VAN), announced that it has reached an agreement with TeraBurst Networks, Inc., to become an authorized reseller of TeraBurst's optical networking products for distributed visualization applications. This agreement complements existing SGI VAN offerings by adding TeraBurst optical networking products for connectivity between SGI Reality Center facilities. The combination of technologies allows technical and creative users to achieve the highest levels of remote interactivity over fast and reliable optical networks, while maintaining the superior image quality of SGI systems.

SGI introduced VAN in January 2002 to accelerate work processes and bring distributed, collaborative teams together around their data. Since its introduction, VAN has gained rapid acceptance in government, education and industry. These technical and creative customers have complex visualization needs that require the advanced capabilities of SGI Onyx family systems, and VAN delivers this power to them regardless of their location or visualization resources.

TeraBurst's unique optical networking capabilities enable remote users and decision-making teams in a VAN environment to see the stereo frame rates and image quality generated by the SGI Onyx system, enabling a new level of remote, collaborative visualization. For example, multisite command-and- control teams can use the high-performance, high-resolution and long distance graphics distribution capabilities from TeraBurst to leverage the data fusion capabilities of an SGI Onyx system to interact with multiple remote high- resolution data and video streams in a 3D environment.

"TeraBurst's technology within an SGI VAN environment gives customers an industry-first solution for real-time transmission of 3D stereoscopic graphics, video and audio -- across optical networks -- and will expand SGI's leadership in the high-end visualization markets," said Terry Oberdank, vice president, Technology Solutions, SGI. "This relationship will further strengthen the ability of SGI to create solutions that deliver the highest levels of collaborative visualization."

"We are pleased to be working with SGI to offer our customers visualization solutions for remote and collaborative applications," said Claude Sandroff, senior vice president of sales and business development for TeraBurst Networks. "As we pursue mutual opportunities in worldwide markets, we expect our combined technologies to enable new applications in multiple industries by offering high-performance interactivity between SGI Reality Center facilities within VAN environments."

TeraBurst's V2O platform is a network interface that directly converts the video signal from SGI systems to a standard telecom-ready signal for either OC3 or OC48 SONET-based optical networks. These systems have been designed to enable low-latency transmission of high-quality graphics images fully synchronized with real-time audio and control data, over a single optical signal for secure and reliable transport within public or private optical networks.

SGI VAN solutions now deliver interactive and multisite collaborative visualization capabilities through either SGI OpenGL Vizserver software, which runs across standard TCP/IP-based local and wide area networks, or with TeraBurst's hardware-based alternative for optical networks. Whether transported via standard TCP/IP or optical networks, SGI VAN solutions deliver universal access to advanced visualization. They allow creators and consumers of dynamic, interactive visual information to solve more complex problems, accelerate work processes, and save infrastructure upgrade costs by centralizing large storage and advanced visualization systems in one location, and using networking technologies to make these systems available to users throughout the enterprise.

For complete details, visit www.sgi.com/visualization/van/.

About SGI

SGI, also known as Silicon Graphics, Inc., is the world's 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 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. SGI was named on FORTUNE magazine's 2003 list of "Top 100 Companies to Work For." With offices worldwide, the company is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., and can be found on the Web at www.sgi.com.