SGI, Intel Claim Slice of Olympic Swimming Gold Medals

Sunnyvale (CA) - You can already envision the marketing frenzy that will surround Michael Phelps, who won eight Olympic Gold medals in eight days at Beijing 2008 Olympic Games that ended yesterday. And there will be many who will want to jump onto that marketing train. SGI and Intel are already on board.

The fact that Phelps won eight Gold medals and so many world records have been broken have been explained through numerous reports, mentioning for example new swimsuits and special devices installed to calm the water, but many nations still doubt whether the competition was a clean as it was presented to be. But if we believe Speedo and SGI, then those world records were clearly supported by Speedo Fastskin LZR Racer swimwear (offered soon in a sports store in your neighborhood), designed on SGI Altix supercomputers that were based on Intel Itanium processors.

At least SGI believes that 2008 may be remembered "as the year swimming and supercomputing became one." We leave it up to you decide how appropriate that pitch is.

SGI said that Speedo’s Aqualab research and development facility began working on these swimsuits on SGI systems more than two years ago computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analyses to better understand how to optimize the flow of water around a swimmer and to create the designs and materials that would give athletes a winning edge. The results delivered swimsuits that are said to create 5 percent less drag that Speedo’s Fastskin FS-Pro suits.

Speedo has begun pre-selling its new swimsuits for prices between $260 and $590.