To address the growing time-to-market challenges for manufacturers competing on a global scale, Silicon Graphics and MSC.Software Corp. today at the SAE Noise and Vibration Conference and Exhibition unveiled a powerful, integrated solution to streamline and accelerate virtual product development (VPD). With VPD solutions, engineers can consider more design alternatives and evaluate them more thoroughly. By subjecting digital prototypes to stress tests, aerodynamic studies and other data-intensive analyses, engineers can verify product designs faster and less expensively than if they built and tested physical mock-ups. "Time-to-market, cost control, and product reliability are critical in a world where manufacturers compete globally," said Dr. Eng Lim Goh, Ph.D., senior vice president and chief technology officer, SGI. "Yet as manufacturers deal with an ever-growing mountain of data, serious bottlenecks can bring productivity to its knees. This new integrated VPD solution dissolves those bottlenecks and makes manufacturing organizations more agile. We're extremely proud to work with MSC.Software and Intel to provide users so comprehensive and scalable an infrastructure for product design, development and analysis." The new integrated solution combines industry-leading technology from each company: SGI's scalable and cost-effective data storage infrastructure, visualization environment and compute technology with MSC.Software's VPD applications and Intel processors. The resulting VPD environment -- optimized to speed time to market of new products -- will enable customers to achieve more efficient workflows, faster results, more productive collaboration, and easier data management. For instance, in real-world tests conducted recently by MSC.Software, an SGI InfiniteStorage storage area network (SAN) solution reduced the time spent waiting for data by a factor of 27. The tests compared a VPD workflow involving transferring a total of 277MB of files between systems over a standard network using FTP to the SAN solution where these files can be accessed without copying using SGI InfiniteStorage shared filesystem CXFS. In this workflow, waiting for data using FTP took more than 10 minutes, but only 22.63 seconds with the SGI SAN CXFS solution. The integrated solution will also help engineers more effectively leverage the many disparate "islands of data" that populate manufacturing organizations today. These islands consist of rapidly growing data assets that result from product design and testing. Product developers must efficiently access and share these assets to achieve timely delivery of reliable, high-quality products in an increasingly competitive marketplace. "The best way to get innovative products to market faster is through the collaborative deployment of VPD solutions and our relationship with Intel and SGI promises to help customers dramatically improve their product development processes," said William Weyand, chairman and CEO, MSC.Software. "With SGI's comprehensive array of industry-leading technology and Intel's powerful Itanium 2 processor architecture, we can deliver extraordinary value throughout all phases of the product lifecycle, saving organizations the three things that matter most: time, money and materials." "Intel's Manufacturing Solutions Team works closely with customers and hardware and software partners to help manufacturing firms increase productivity, lower operating costs and improve customer satisfaction," said Dick Bland, Director of Worldwide Manufacturing Solutions at Intel Corp. "By leveraging the power and scalability of the Itanium 2 architecture, an enhanced VPD environment built around SGI hardware and MSC.Software can enable delivery of all these benefits to even the most demanding manufacturing environment." The companies' comprehensive VPD solution combines all the essential components from hardware, software, and data management into an easy-to-deploy infrastructure for manufacturers that can be contained in a single rack. -- Efficient workflow. SGI's unique data-centric approach enables manufacturing engineers to manage all their data from central consolidated storage. Key to this is the SGI CXFS shared filesystem. -- Faster results. The new integrated solution cuts time-to-solution for large problems by leveraging the high-performance SGI Altix server platform. Altix incorporates SGI's NUMAflex global shared-memory architecture that enables engineers to hold entire data sets in memory, allowing for faster and more interactive data analysis. Altix also is underpinned by scalable Intel Itanium 2 processors and the Linux 64-bit operating system. All these components work together to drive maximum performance from a specially optimized version of MSC.Nastran, part of the MSC.Software SimOffice product portfolio and the world's leading simulation and finite element analysis (FEA) product used by manufacturers around the world to simulate loads and stresses on mechanical systems and components. -- Streamlined collaboration. The Silicon Graphics Prism high-performance visualization platform enables engineers to access and share MSC.Nastran analysis results as soon as they are ready. The Silicon Graphics Prism system serves as the heart of a Visual Area Network (VAN) which - through OpenGL Vizserver software - enables engineers to interact in real-time with complex graphics data from different locations and using virtually any computing system. -- Easier data management. SGI's data lifecycle management (DLM) solution virtualizes all storage assets, creating a scalable storage pool that is transparent to users and applications. DLM ensures that data is always stored on the most appropriate and cost-effective media. -- Infinite scalability. With the enhanced VPD infrastructure solution, manufacturing organizations can re-assign system resources as needed and to accommodate growing requirements. The SGI and MSC.Software VPD environment also interoperates with legacy systems from other hardware vendors and operating systems. This protects existing technology investments and promotes an enhanced, heterogeneous VPD infrastructure. Pricing and availability The enhanced VPD environment is available today in configurations priced from $120,000. For more information on SGI products for creating a VPD environment, visit its Website.