Silicon Graphics Prism Systems to Increase Mining Accuracy and Collaborative Medical Education

1 January 1970

To enable Canadian mining and exploration companies to more accurately locate prime resources and to support the first new medical school in Ontario in 30 years, Silicon Graphics ( NYSE: SGI ) today announced that two Canadian universities, Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, and Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, purchased an array of Silicon Graphics® visualization systems, SGI® InfiniteStorage solutions and SGI® visual area networking ( VAN ) software. SGI VAN will allow students, faculty, and researchers from both universities to simultaneously access and share data in real time from the SGI systems in both locations. Funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Ontario Innovation Trust secured the funding for all the systems at both universities.

Linux® OS-Based Immersive Visualization Environment at MIRARCO
Laurentian University's not-for-profit research and development company, MIRARCO ( Mining Innovation, Rehabilitation and Applied Research Corp. ) is modeled on the immersive 3D-visualization facilities pioneered by SGI for the oil and gas industry and was the first large scale virtual reality ( VR ) facility built specifically to meet the ever expanding needs of the mining industry. Since its opening in 2001, MIRARCO has shared its expertise with most of the major Canadian mining companies and a number of international resource exploration companies.

At MIRARCO, both the new Silicon Graphics Prism™ and existing Silicon Graphics® Onyx® visualization systems are connected to three new Christie DLP projectors with an overall resolution of approximately three million pixels. Data is visualized in stereo on a spherical screen with an arc length of 22 feet and a 12-foot radius to maximize the understanding of complex geological structures. The Silicon Graphics Prism is specifically designed to handle the large data and six-fold increase in computing and visualization power required by this environment. "As the mining industry moves forward and brings more data into their models, the physical memory of the computer becomes a real constraint. The advantage of using a system such as Silicon Graphics Prism is that the memory is far greater than what you can get on a personal computer," said Andrew Dasys, start-up director, MIRARCO. "What we find interesting about Silicon Graphics Prism is that its move to a Linux based platform gives us flexibility, increased capacity, and access to a vast number of software applications."

Geoscientists will use the Silicon Graphics Prism system for large-scale visualization to analyze and interpret countless kilometers of drill hole cores obtained from a mine site as well as to create complex geological models. Depending on the size of the site, the amount of data extracted from drill cores can be very large.

"A small exploration site may have 100 holes. Placer Dome, one of the largest international gold mining companies, came into the VR Lab with close to 70,000 drill holes from one of their properties in Timmins, Ontario," added Dasys. "Mining relies on drill cores and uses a variety of geophysics surveying techniques and analysis interpreting tools. The SGI system combines all of this data together and allows groups of multidisciplinary professionals—such as field geologists, geophysicists, structural geologists, mining engineers and investors—to come together and interpret this data prior to making strategic decisions."

The data generated in the VR Lab can be shared with Lakehead University or anywhere within MIRARCO's expanding network, which Dasys noted, is a huge advantage: "Our new SGI Visual Area Networking technology allows data to be transmitted to multiple recipients. If people can't physically make it to an analysis session, they can still be there virtually."

"As the oil and gas industry rapidly adopts Silicon Graphics Prism visualization systems for their speed, power and cost effectiveness, and software giants such as Landmark Graphics, Paradigm Geophysical and Earth Decision Sciences certify their seismic processing and analysis software for Silicon Graphics Prism, it is only natural that mining companies seek the same scientific and technological advances from SGI to aid and enhance their search for resources," said Shawn Underwood, director, Visual Systems Group, SGI. "MIRARCO's state-of-the-art Virtual Reality Lab is a major introduction into new markets for SGI."

Northern Ontario School of Medicine—New Frontiers in Distributed Education
The Northern Ontario School of Medicine, which will welcome its first students in September, will be distributed across the campuses of Laurentian University and Lakehead University—which are separated by 1,000 kilometers. Silicon Graphics Visual Area Networking remote and collaborative visualization software is installed on the Silicon Graphics Prism and other Silicon Graphics visualization systems on both campuses to allow students to use high-powered molecular modeling and medical visualization capabilities to improve undergraduate education and research no matter where they are located.

Looking ahead, SGI VAN capabilities will also enable family practice-oriented students to do their internships and deliver much needed medical services in the remote towns and communities of Northern Ontario while continuing to attend classes and leverage the advanced computerized laboratories. The new SGI systems in both locations give the universities the opportunity to tap into the vast amount of work being done on medical visualization as well as providing a new level of standardization with other medical and teaching research throughout Canada and around the world.

For the VR Lab upgrade, MIRARCO—through Laurentian University—purchased an 8-processor Silicon Graphics Prism with 4 graphics pipes and 16GB memory. Based on best-of-breed industry-standard components with Linux OS, Intel® Itanium® 2 processors, and ATI® FireGL™ graphics, Silicon Graphics Prism systems can scale to 16 graphics pipelines and 256 processors. MIRARCO also added 8TB of SGI InfiniteStorage TP9300 and an 8-processor Silicon Graphics Onyx visualization system to its VR Lab upgrade. Lakehead University, which previously purchased a SGI 64-processor Altix® system, also acquired an 8-processor Silicon Graphics® Onyx4™ visualization system with 4 graphics pipes and 16GB memory. The new systems, which were purchased and installed in Q3 of SGI's fiscal year 2004, also include 8TB of SGI TP9300 storage and SGI OpenGL Vizserver™ collaborative software.

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 change, 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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