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SGI Announces Restructuring, Cuts 400 Jobs
kerneljacabo writes "Yikes! SGI seems to be the lastest victim of the economic downturn. Today they announced an extensive 'restructuring,' which includes releasing about 10% (400) of their employess. Seems like no one is immune." SGI claims this'll save them $40M, as well as improve their performance next fiscal year.
for those that don't know, fuckedcompany is the best 'news' source for stuff like this.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
SGI did not write FSV (File System Visualizer), Daniel Richard did that and infact was inspired by FSN. FSN (Fusion) is the 3d file system navigator featured in Jurassic Park, but SGI hasn't updated it for awhile (it only works on IRIX versions 5.3 and below.
$40M / 400 = $100k per employee, which sounds absolutely standard for a skilled white-collar job. When I worked for a large (and still successful) company in the tech industry, that was the figure they used to estimate how much each employee cost them: my salary was about half that, and the rest was taxes, benefits, 401(k) match (heh, remember those?), building upkeep, chicken giblets for the cafeteria, etc. etc. etc.
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
i see Rick Belluzzo is living large at Microsoft after driving SGI into the ground? At high corporate levels performance means nothing, knowing the right people means everything. Same with venture capital: its knowing the right corporate heavyweights - nothing to do with ideas :(
amor, paz, esperanza, muelle
Saludos
miguel
Before adopting WHATWG, read the moonlight.NET EULA [http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/moonlight.mspx]
You may be replacing someone who had been there for 10 years. You'll cost them less. In 10 years, you'll be the one getting let go.
$40M sounds about right. Consider that cost of employment is between 1.5-2x an individuals salary.
Say an average salary of $50K.
400*50k*1.5=30,000,000
" * " *2.0=40,000,000
Factor average salary up just a little and it's pretty damn close.
And 50K/year is diddly squat in silicon valley.
Typical employee cost is salary plus 15%-35% over the top of that cost for employee benefits like insurance and 401k matching.
--- I do not moderate.
You're talking about CrayLink [ibm.com], which is the memory sharing technology in SGI MIPS supers. Supposedly SGI bought Cray just to get the patent--a purchase that cost them a lot of money, very little of which they got back when they sold Cray off again. But IBM and Sun have similar technologies. Whether they're as good as CrayLink, I couldn't say. Still, SGI Origin series no longer dominates the supercomputer market [top500.org].
SGI's scalable numa architecture is an offshoot of Stanford University's DASH project. The "Cray" in CrayLink was done for marketing reasons. The original productized version of the Cray Link interconnects was in the Origin 2000 (SN0), at 1.6 GByte/sec per cable with up to six cables to each node. In Origin 3000 (SN1) it's 3.2 GByte/sec. In Altix(SN2) it's up to 6.4 GByte/sec. SGI has put a lot of work into keeping the latency of both the NumaLink architecture and its software very low... even on a 1024 processor machine.
The ranking on Top500 is mostly CPU-based. Cluster-type machines tend to score very well as I/O thruput isn't reflected very well in the benchmark. Most users need all the CPU they can get, but there are still many that need insane amounts of I/O... for those sorts of people, there's the Origin and Altix.
$40,000,000 / 400 people = $100,000/person.
Wow.
Not really. You have to include all the hidden costs, which are about equal to a person's salary: benefits, insurance, taxes, office space, management, etc.
Original Mac's could also update the mouse cursor during VBL. It was a complaint that some game designers had with the Apple II/II+ design, no reasonable way to sync to refresh for the smoothest animation with single-digit MHz CPU's. That's where we got some of our ideas when we were designing the Amiga architecture.
The UMA (unified memory architecture) also has a heritage from the Apple II, to the Mac, to the Amiga; and SGI used it in some of their later workstations and the N64 chipset. Of course the bandwidths needed these days requires a different solution.
VW = Visual Workstation. I think.
Apparently the folks in GIS (seismic oil/gas exploration). Their office on Westheimer (Houston) is now dark and has little "do not enter" tape up.
The Linux/Windows clusters got 'em. Look around at the GIS tech companies; they're either already using clusters, in the process of migrating to clusters, or getting ready to lay people off.