Mitrionics & SGI Present Workshop on Mitrion-Accelerated NCBI BLAST & FPGA Supercomputing at Manchester Technical Symposium

Market Wire, March, 2007

Mitrionics(TM), Inc., developer of the Mitrion(TM) Virtual Processor and software-centric Mitrion-C parallel programming language for FPGA Supercomputing acceleration, and SGI (NASDAQ: SGIC), manufacturer of FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array)-based SGI® Altix® family servers with SGI® RASC(TM) RC100 computation blades, will be co-hosting and presenting a full-day workshop titled, "20x faster NCBI BLAST - Practical Programming of FPGA Supercomputing Applications" at the third "Technical Symposium on Reconfigurable Computing" at the University of Manchester in the UK this March 27-29, 2007. The workshop will cover a broad range of introductory-to-advanced topics, using the acceleration of the NCBI BLAST application, as an example of a successful implementation. The workshop is designed to provide attendees with a theoretical as well as a working knowledge of how to develop FPGA Supercomputing applications.

SGI Life Science Briefing, presented by Dr Eng Lim Goh, SGI's CTO

Location: The Welcome Trust Conference Centre in Cambridge on Friday 30th March 2007.

This briefing will provide a detailed exploration of the future of life sciences, and in particular the use of HPC in areas such as bioinformatics, cheminformatics, molecular modeling and genomics. This interactive half-day event will give a comprehensive insight into future trends and opportunities in HPC, and their impact on research, organizations and the way business is conducted. For more information and to register, visit: http://www.jarrang.com/SGI/ls/email.html .

"This is an exciting time for Mitrionics and SGI to demonstrate the world's most widely used bioinformatics application that has been accelerated to run 20x faster on the Mitrion Virtual Processor and SGI RASC System," stated Anders Dellson, CEO of Mitrionics, Inc. "We look forward to our continued strong partnership and cooperation with SGI in delivering BLASTN and additional turnkey bioinformatics applications and also to accelerate applications in other industries with strong potential and interest such as financial, imaging, seismology, and encryption."

"SGI has long been focused on accelerating our customer's critical computing workflows and making them accessible directly to end-user scientists," said Michael Brown, sciences segment manager, SGI. "Our cooperative efforts with Mitrionics on BLASTN show how some of these time-critical processes can leverage FPGA capabilities and turn long running batch jobs into interactive scientific investigation. We believe that the combination of simpler application development and deployment enabled by Mitrionics software and the inherent performance, price/performance and power consumption benefits of FPGA based solutions will continue to drive adoption throughout the scientific community."

About the Manchester Technical Symposium for Reconfigurable Computing

The symposium is targeted at researchers and vendors actively involved in High Performance Reconfigurable Computing (HPRC), FPGAs and High Performance Computing. It focuses on HPRC tools and applications to explore the opportunities and challenges experienced by users. Presentations and posters that target the scientific applications community (e.g., scientific applications; HPRC software development using high-level programming languages; methodologies and tools for HPRC that allow the scientist to focus on science instead of programming) are given the highest consideration. The conference will be part of a week of events, including training and user meetings. More info at: http://www.mc.manchester.ac.uk/services/courses/fpga/2007

SGI - Innovation for Results(TM)

SGI (NASDAQ: SGIC) is a leader in high-performance computing. SGI delivers a complete range of high-performance server and storage solutions along with industry-leading professional services and support that enable its customers to overcome the challenges of complex data-intensive workflows and accelerate breakthrough discoveries, innovation and information transformation. SGI solutions help customers solve their computing challenges whether it's enhancing the quality of life through drug research, designing and manufacturing safer and more efficient cars and airplanes, studying global climate, providing technologies for homeland security and defense, or helping enterprises manage large data. With offices worldwide, the company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., and can be found on the Web at www.sgi.com .

About the Mitrion Platform and Mitrion Virtual Processor

The fine-grained, massively parallel Mitrion Virtual Processor is the core of the Mitrion Platform. It runs software written in the Mitrion-C parallel programming language in FPGAs and completely eliminates the need for the programmer to master hardware design. The Mitrion Virtual Processor has a unique architecture that lets it be adapted to each program it is running in order to maximize performance. Together with the Mitrion Software Development Kit, it offers a unique solution for developing supercomputing applications for FPGAs on a true software level. This dramatically reduces the total development costs for FPGA-based software acceleration, and more importantly, enables the whole supercomputing industry to benefit from FPGA application acceleration.