The cornerstone of the alliance is a worldwide reseller agreement whereby SGI’s global sales force will begin selling the Mitrion Platform and Mitrion Virtual Processor with the SGI RASC RC100 computation blade in SGI Altix family servers. As the two leading companies in FPGA Supercomputing, Mitrionics and SGI are working closely together on a number of activities designed to help their customers test and deploy their solutions. Activities include mutual customer development/support, joint sales and marketing events, customer application development, and product integration.

FPGA Supercomputing is an exciting and growing market segment based on technology that enables processor performance acceleration 10x to 100x greater than traditional processors. The SGI RASC RC100 packs the power of dozens of supercomputer nodes into a single blade and the software-centric Mitrion Platform is ideal for software developers, scientists, and researchers within areas such as bioinformatics, oil and gas, imaging and financial industries. Mitrionics and SGI are leading the industry in developing and deploying real-world applications and systems based on FPGA Supercomputing technology.

Mitrionics and SGI are collaborating in a variety of ways to increase the adoption and refinement of FPGA Supercomputing technology and applications. In order to support SGI's customers and market opportunities for the RC100, Mitrionics will develop proof-of-concept and demonstration applications for SGI's systems. The companies have worked together to ensure tight integration between the Mitrion Platform and SGI's system, development, and debugging tools. And, the companies are jointly sponsoring and participating in numerous workshops and industry events in the U.S. and Europe during 2006 to educate the supercomputing community on the latest development and technology trends and breakthroughs in FPGA Supercomputing.

"Our joint customers are becoming the first to fully experience the performance acceleration and power savings of running real-world commercial applications using FPGA-based systems instead of traditional clusters", stated Anders Dellson, CEO of Mitrionics Inc. "SGI has demonstrated the vision, commitment, and technology expertise to become the early market leader for system vendors in the FPGA Supercomputing market segment."

"Based on the mutual success and close collaboration SGI and Mitrionics have shared with complementary technologies and joint customers, this reseller agreement is a natural progression of our business relationship", stated Bill Mannel, Director of Systems Marketing, SGI. "Our ability to achieve significant progress in a short period of time is largely credited to Mitrion's unique and superior technology platform for developing FPGA Supercomputing applications."

Based on SGI's groundbreaking RASC (Reconfigurable Application-Specific Computing) technology, the new RC100 blade is designed for customers whose applications spend most of their time working on a set of specific routines or algorithms. By accelerating those routines, RASC technology can dramatically improve the performance of the overall application.

Designed for use with award-winning SGI Altix servers, the SGI RASC RC100 blade can be programmed at the customer's site to accelerate mission-critical, high-performance computing (HPC) applications in oil and gas exploration, defense and intelligence, bioinformatics, medical imaging, and broadcast media.