SGI joins new reseller team

SGI Federal has teamed with World Wide Technology Inc., an electronic marketplace operator, to resell its high-end computer products through the General Services Administration Federal Supply Service, Silicon Graphics Inc. announced Tuesday.

SGI lost one of its federal resellers, EdgeMark Systems Inc., when EdgeMark decided to exit the federal market last month in favor of developing its commercial consulting business.

SGI entered an agreement with World Wide Technology to sell SGI products and services through GSA schedule contracts. World Wide Technology, established in 1990, provides Internet-based business-to-business electronic marketplaces for information technology products and services. Its service also helps participants respond to product availability inquiries, coordinate deliveries and track inventory.

The agreement reinforces SGI's strategy of partnering with premier resellers and federal systems integrators, said Anthony Robbins, president of SGI Federal.

In other news, SGI announced the implementation of its products in two supercomputing and visualization centers.

The U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center Major Shared Resource Center (ERDC MSRC) in Vicksburg, Miss., has installed a 512-processor SGI Origin 3800 supercomputer. The machine is the largest shared-memory system in the SGI Origin 3000 server series.

The Army's ERDC MSRC specializes in five Defense Department-designated computational technology areas, including computational structural mechanics; computational fluid dynamics; climate/weather/ocean modeling and simulation; forces modeling and simulation; and environmental quality modeling and simulation.

SGI also announced that the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland has opened a new Reconfigurable Advanced Visualization Environment (RAVE) powered by a Silicon Graphics Onyx2 visualization system with the InfiniteReality3 graphics subsystem. The system, delivered by FakeSpace Systems Inc., will give NASA Glenn the computing and graphics power for collaboration on structural analysis simulations, SGI officials said in a statement.

Silicon Graphics Onyx2 processes 3-D graphics and 2-D imaging and video data in real time.