SGI Technology Powers Red Team in DARPA Grand Challenge

1 January 1970

Visualization and storage technology from Silicon Graphics Inc. ( NYSE: SGI ) is helping a Carnegie Mellon University-led team to prepare for a 150-mile race this fall sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ( DARPA ) that is designed to demonstrate the efficacy of autonomous ground vehicles to navigate treacherous desert roads and trails without human drivers in the least amount of time. Ultimately, the goal of the DARPA field test is to accelerate research and development in robotic ground vehicles that will help save soldiers' lives on the battlefield.

Earlier this month, DARPA announced that 40 teams including the Red Team were selected to advance to the semifinals of the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge autonomous ground vehicle competition. DARPA selected the semifinalists from a field of 118 entrants. The Red Team's H1ghlander and Sandstorm vehicles were both selected to participate in a week of qualifications in late September and early October at the California Speedway in Fontana that will narrow the field to 20 competitors.

The winner-take-all race is scheduled for October 8 in the Mojave Desert and will include both natural and man-made obstacles throughout the racecourse. The team that develops an autonomous ground vehicle that finishes the designated route the fastest within the 10-hour time limit will receive a $2 million prize. Because the exact route will not be revealed to competing teams until two hours before the race begins, the ability to quickly, effectively and accurately plan the best route will be a strategic advantage for achieving success on race day.

A four-processor Silicon Graphics Prism™ power configuration and a two-processor Silicon Graphics Prism™ deskside configuration, each with two graphics pipes, will provide Carnegie Mellon University's Red Team with the computing muscle and visualization capabilities to enable the quickest route planning for its two robotic vehicles competing in this year's DARPA Grand Challenge. The Red Team uses a combination of archived terrain data and preplanned route locations referenced and tracked via the Global Positioning System ( GPS ), as well as on-board sensors to help decide the best path and how to overcome obstacles along the way.

A 10TB SGI® InfiniteStorage TP9500 storage array from SGI and Engenio will store satellite imagery data of the route. The Red Team will preload thousands of miles of terrain data of the Nevada desert race site to plan optimum speed and route. The entire racecourse will be driven in simulation on the terrain model to ensure the best, most efficient route for the vehicles. The Red Team will rely on the industry-leading speed of the TP9500 to readily process the satellite data for mapping to the final race route.

"SGI's contribution to the Red Team with its powerful Prism and InfiniteStorage systems has huge advantages for the planning and simulation that ultimately determines the intended route and speed of our unmanned vehicles at race time," said Carnegie Mellon University's William "Red" Whittaker, captain of the Red Team. "With ready access to the satellite data and SGI's advanced visualization features and Intel Itanium 2 processors, Silicon Graphics Prism is truly a high-performance system that blazes through our biggest and most demanding sets of terrain data, providing our team with a highly accurate map of the route and what we believe will be the winning edge for our vehicles to run a successful race."

"Although the DARPA Grand Challenge is designed to accelerate R&D in autonomous ground vehicles for defense applications, the Red Team's work will also help to fuel an innovative new class of robotic ground vehicles for a host of future civilian and commercial uses," said Paul Temple, senior business development manager, SGI Federal. "We are excited to contribute to that innovation through SGI's ability to rapidly digest and visualize multi-terabyte terrain data sets, giving the Red Team a powerful tool and groundbreaking insights for planning its race routes. The Red Team's productivity has been transformed by Prism's lightning fast ability to load data sets at multi-gigabyte-per-second rates that will no doubt serve the team well in the 'golden hour' before the DARPA Grand Challenge when time is of the essence. "

On October 8, the Red Team's goal is to put its two vehicles on the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge starting line and one in the winner's circle. The 40-member Red Team, which includes sponsors such as AM General, Boeing, Caterpillar, Intel and SAIC, will compete in this year's Grand Challenge with two entries based on AM General's Humvee vehicle design. The Red Team's Sandstorm vehicle will return to defend its 2004 distance and speed record, and a new H1 design dubbed "H1ghlander" will also compete.

Additional information about the 2005 Grand Challenge can be found on DARPA's website at www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/index.html

About Silicon Graphics Prism
With the Silicon Graphics Prism visualization family, limits are meant to be broken. Scaling up to 16 graphics pipelines and 256 processors, the Silicon Graphics Prism family offers many times the visualization capability of any other computing system available. For leaders, innovators and visionaries, this scalability translates into the ability to interactively visualize terabytes of data in their native form without having to waste hours culling it beforehand. Instead, efforts can be focused on discovering hidden details in the dataset in order to push limits and solve previously unsolved problems.

About SGI InfiniteStorage
SGI InfiniteStorage is a complete line of scalable, high-performance storage solutions built specifically for data intensive environments. In addition to Linux® and SGI® IRIX® operating systems, SGI InfiniteStorage solutions for Intelligent Consolidation, Data Lifecycle Management and Data Protection support Solaris™, AIX®, Windows®, 64- and 32-bit Linux, and Mac OS® X systems and other UNIX® platforms. High-performance storage arrays, including the SGI® TP9500, deliver industry-leading performance in a full end-to-end 2Gb Fibre Channel solution with state-of-the-art disk drives, parallel high-performance controllers, and advanced cache management.

About DARPA Grand Challenge
Created in response to a Congressional and DoD mandate, DARPA Grand Challenge is a field test intended to accelerate research and development in autonomous ground vehicles that will help save American lives on the battlefield. The Grand Challenge brings together individuals and organizations from industry, the R&D community, government, the armed services, academia, students, backyard inventors, and automotive enthusiasts in the pursuit of a technological challenge.

About the Red Team
The Red Team is an alliance of individuals, non-profits, and for-profits committed to win the DARPA Grand Challenge. Members include students, volunteers, and professionals embedded from our corporate sponsors.

Red Team operates under the auspices of the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, a world leader in the development of mobile robotics. Robots designed at Carnegie Mellon have traversed Antarctica and the Atacama Desert, explored abandoned mines, and scaled active volcanoes.

Carnegie Mellon University's Red Team website is at www.redteamracing.org.

SILICON GRAPHICS | The Source of Innovation and Discovery™
SGI, also known as Silicon Graphics, Inc. ( NYSE: SGI ), is a 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, providing technologies for homeland security and defense 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. With offices worldwide, the company is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., and can be found on the Web at www.sgi.com.

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