SGI today announced that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has selected SGI to equip the next generation of the EPA's Scientific Research Computing initiatives. The $1.6 million technology and services contract involves high-performance, power-efficient SGI servers and storage solutions, and was announced after a detailed evaluation process. At its Research Triangle Park, N.C. research facilities, the EPA will install an extensive SGI Altix 4700 blade server deployment. The Altix 4700 system will drive a broad array of demanding scientific applications, including Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) models, Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) models, Gaussian and Fluent. To more efficiently manage its rapidly growing environmental research data and shorten its time to results, the EPA also acquired a large-scale SGI InfiniteStorage 4000 RAID solution and an SGI InfiniteStorage NAS solution. SGI completed installation of the Altix 4700 system in November, and the system is currently undergoing acceptance by the customer. In an exhaustive competitive evaluation that lasted several months, SGI prevailed over the incumbent provider as well as other leading providers of HPC solutions. Key to the selection was SGI's performance in a comprehensive battery of benchmark tests based on the agency's target application suite. SGI believes that its award-winning Professional Services organization and longstanding relationship as a high-performance computing (HPC) solutions provider to the U.S. government contributed to its success. "SGI is proud to support the Environmental Protection Agency's mission to protect human health and the environment with the powerful combination of our blade-based Altix 4700 server and InfiniteStorage NAS and RAID data management solutions," said Dave Parry, senior vice president and product general manager, SGI. "As America's population tops 300 million, understanding and preserving our human and natural resources has never been more essential. SGI solutions will shorten EPA scientists' time to insight and deliver precisely what the EPA sought in awarding this contract: Innovation for Results." SGI solutions are engineered to maximize power efficiency. For instance, SGI Altix 4700 systems leverage power-efficient components, including Dual- Core Intel Itanium 2 processors and power supplies that are more than 90 percent efficient. And unlike competing server architectures, Altix allows customers to increase memory, even to terascale levels, without having to drive up processor counts. This saves energy and resource consumption while significantly reducing power and cooling costs.