SGI LEADS EFFORT TO SCALE LINUX TO 128 PROCESSORS IN A SINGLE-SYSTEM

Crossing the wire 9AM EST, August 5, 2003.


SGI LEADS EFFORT TO SCALE LINUX TO 128 PROCESSORS IN A SINGLE-SYSTEM
CONFIGURATION

National Laboratories and Major Universities to Participate in Extensive
Real-World Tests of 128-Processor SGI Altix 3000 HPC System  

LINUX WORLD EXPO, SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. (Aug. 5, 2003)SGI (NYSE: SGI) today
announced plans to extend the industry-leading scalability of its SGI®
Altix(tm) 3000 servers to encompass a record 128 processors within a single
instance of the Linux® operating environment. SGI, which already provides
award-winning Linux OS-based Altix 3000 systems that scale to 64 Intel®
Itanium® 2 processors, intends to site-test 128-processor systems with
national laboratories and leading universities around the world. Initial
results of testing in customer laboratories are expected in early September.

Participants in the global program include in the United States the U.S.
Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC and the Pacific Northwest
National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, and abroad, the University of
Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and The Computing Center at Johannes
Kepler University in Linz, Austria. The program participants conduct complex
research in a range of scientific fields. Their demanding work requires
massive scalability at levels that can provide effective and revealing
stress loads on the 128-processor system prior to its commercial
availability as a standard SGI product.

"In areas of advanced and important Navy research-such as computational
fluid dynamics, climate/weather/oceans modeling and simulation,
computational chemistry and materials, and computational electromagnetics
and acoustics-complex problems can literally take months to solve," said
Wendell Anderson, Senior Research Mathematician, U.S. Naval Research
Laboratory. "With large shared memory systems, such as Altix running 128
processors, we can solve our most complex problems and workloads and save
weeks of time because of the scalability and efficiency of the SGI
architecture."

"SGI customers are constantly pushing the limits of computing," said Jan
Silverman, senior vice president and general manager, Industry Solutions and
Services, SGI. "As soon as we launched the Altix 3000 family they asked when
we would scale a single system to 128 processors. With their assistance, we
are responding to their need for more processing power and all the benefits
of NUMA-based computing combined with the benefits of the Linux operating
system."

Since its introduction, the Altix supercluster has been recognized as the
first Linux cluster to scale to 64 processors within a single node and the
first cluster to allow global shared-memory access across nodes. Inspired by
the success of the Altix family and the powerful combination of standard
Linux on Intel Itanium 2 processors, developers have ported more than 60
commercially available high- performance manufacturing, science, energy and
environmental applications to the 64-bit Linux environment. More than
two-thirds of those applications have been certified and optimized for the
platform.

The 128-processor beta program continues the growing momentum generated by
the Altix 3000 family of servers and supercomputers, which earned "Best of
Show" honors at its Linux World debut in January and recently was named
"Product of the Year" by the editors of Linux Journal. The momentum
continued in June, when the Altix family also won "Best Linux Hardware"
honors at the LinuxUser & Developer Expo. 

Since its introduction, the SGI® AltixÔ 3700 supercluster has been
recognized as the first Linux cluster to scale to 64 processors within a
single node and the first cluster to allow global shared-memory access
across nodes. Inspired by the success of the SGI Altix family and the
powerful combination of standard Linux on Intel Itanium 2 processors,
developers have ported more than 60 commercially available high-performance
manufacturing, science, energy and environmental applications to the 64-bit
Linux environment. More than two-thirds of those applications have been
certified and optimized for the platform.

Availability
SGI Altix 3000 servers and superclusters supporting the new 128-processor
node size are expected to be available as fully supported configurations in
spring of 2004, when the beta program concludes. SGI Altix 3000 servers and
superclusters supporting 64-processor nodes, in configurations of up to 128
Intel Itanium 2 processors, are available today from SGI. For customers
demanding even larger Altix superclusters, SGI expects to support
configurations of 256 processors in September and 512 processors in October
2003. Additional Altix system technical and availability information is
posted on www.sgi.com/servers/altix.

This news release contains forward-looking statements regarding SGI
technologies and third-party technologies that are subject to risks and
uncertainties. These risks and uncertainties could cause actual results to
differ materially from those described in such statements. The reader is
cautioned not to rely unduly on these forward-looking statements, which are
not a guarantee of future or current performance. Such risks and
uncertainties include long-term program commitments, the performance of
third parties, the sustained performance of current and future products,
financing risks, the ability to integrate and support a complex technology
solution involving multiple providers and users, and other risks detailed
from time to time in the company's most recent SEC reports, including its
reports on From 10-K and Form 10-Q.

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.

-end-

Silicon Graphics, SGI and the SGI logo are registered trademarks and Altix
is a trademark of Silicon Graphics, Inc., in the United States and/or other
countries worldwide. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in
several countries. Intel and Itanium are registered trademarks of Intel
Corporation. All other trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their
respective owners.


Ginny Babbitt
SGI Product PR
650-933-4519
ginnyb@sgi.com

www.sgi.com/products