The Silicon Graphics Prism is a series of visualization computer systems developed and manufactured by

Silicon Graphics Silicon Graphics, Inc. (stylized as SiliconGraphics before 1999, later rebranded SGI, historically known as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) was an American high-performance computing manufacturer, producing computer hardware and soft ...

(SGI). Released in April 2005, the Prism's basic system architecture is based on the Altix 3000 servers, but with graphics hardware. The Prism uses the

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

operating system and the

OpenGL OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a Language-independent specification, cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D computer graphics, 2D and 3D computer graphics, 3D vector graphics. The API is typic ...

software library. Three models of the SGI Prism are Power, Team and Extreme levels. * The Power level supports two to eight

Itanium 2 Itanium (; ) is a discontinued family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64). The Itanium architecture originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and was later jointly developed by HP and I ...

processors, up to 96 GB of memory and two to four

graphics pipeline The computer graphics pipeline, also known as the rendering pipeline, or graphics pipeline, is a framework within computer graphics that outlines the necessary procedures for transforming a three-dimensional (3D) scene into a two-dimensional (2 ...

s. * The Team level supports 8 to 16 Itanium 2 processors, up to 192 GB of memory and four to eight graphics pipelines. * The Extreme level supports 16 to 256 Itanium 2 processors, up to 3 TB of memory and 4 to 16 graphics pipelines. The graphics pipelines for the Prism are ATI

FireGL AMD FirePro was AMD's brand of graphics cards designed for use in workstations and servers running professional Computer-aided design (CAD), Computer-generated imagery (CGI), Digital content creation (DCC), and High-performance computing/GPGP ...

cards based on either the R350 or R420

GPU A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed for digital image processing and to accelerate computer graphics, being present either as a discrete video card or embedded on motherboards, mobile phones, personal ...

References

Prism PRISM is a code name for a program under which the United States National Security Agency (NSA) collects internet communications from various U.S. internet companies. The program is also known by the SIGAD . PRISM collects stored internet ...

Very long instruction word computing 64-bit computers {{Compu-hardware-stub