Space Imaging's satellite ground stations powered by Origion systems

The SGI Origin 2000 systems are used in the Space Imaging ground stations to process the large files of imagery data transmitted to Earth by the IKONOS satellite, which became the first satellite to produce commercial one-meter high-resolution satellite imagery of Earth after its successful launch in September 1999. The availability of commercial one-meter high-resolution Earth imagery promises to open new markets valued at billions of dollars, according to industry analysts. Prior to the IKONOS launch, high-resolution one-meter satellite imagery was available only for military and intelligence community use.

The IKONOS one-meter commercial high-resolution imagery can distinguish objects on the earth's surface such as cars and trucks, roads, pipelines, individual trees, houses, large equipment, boats, ships and airplanes, from some 400 miles above the earth. IKONOS is producing imagery that can be used for a variety of market applications, including urban planning, environmental monitoring, mapping, natural disaster assessment, telecommunications network planning, oil and gas exploration, and agricultural monitoring.

In addition to providing the Origin 2000 servers for use in Space Imaging ground stations, SGI also provides computer hardware, software and consulting services to Space Imaging for training, imagery exploitation systems and geospatial visualization applications.

The SGI Origin 2000 server family is used for high-performance, computationally intensive applications in business, government and the scientific and technical communities. Use of SGI MIPS processors, combined with its IRIX operating system and ccNUMA architecture in a 64-bit scalable server environment, allows Origin 2000 servers to scale to thousands of processors, providing the opportunity to seamlessly grow as customer requirements demand.