OCTANE CADduo allows two users on one system

Mountain View, 04 November 97 The new Sillicon Graphics OCTANE CADduo option enables two users to work on one OCTANE system at the same time, thereby increasing the functionality and decreasing the total cost per seat. With two computer-aided design (CAD) seats per OCTANE, system, administration and support costs are also reduced.

Now two engineers can use an OCTANE CADduo to model components, and at the end of the day, bring the entire assembly together on one machine for review. The throughput of the OCTANE workstation's crossbar architecture allows these two users to work at full speed.

Instead of having two standard CAD seats with 128 Megabyte of memory each, OCTANE CADduo users can share a 256 Megabyte memory space, thereby making better use of the available memory. The multi-user capability of IRIX Silicon Graphics' UNIX implementation, includes a scheduler to allocate system resources between the two users. The IRIX operating system also allocates memory and CPU capacity to whichever user requires it.

Shipping this quarter, the OCTANE CADduo option provides OCTANE users an additional 128 Megabbyte of memory, 4 Gigabyte hard disk, an OCTANE /SI graphics board, a PCI card cage, PCI card with Ethernet and keyboard connectors and a 20-inch monitor and keyboard, for a second user. The OCTANE family comes standard with 100Base-TX/10Base-T Ethernet, analog and digital audio I/O, external speakers, one or two MIPS R10000 microprocessors, 64, 128 or 256 Megabyte of memory and 2 or 4 Gigabyte hard disk. It has a 20-inch monitor and one of three graphics options: SI, SSI or MXI.

Sandra Wermer