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SGI Acquires Linux Networx Assets, LNXI Dead?
anzha writes "It seems that that Linux Networx, the pioneering Linux supercomputing company, has gone belly up. SGI announced that it has bought the core assets of LNXI. Furthermore, the rumors are that the doors were locked and employees were just given their paychecks. This analysis, on the other hand, claims that SGI has 'made employment offers to many LNXI engineers.' It's unclear what kind of support will be extended to customers of LNXI's Clusterworx Advanced products. What does this mean for the future of Linux supercomputing?"
Isn't grid supercomputing best done on Macs, or via MOSIX, or a homebrew Beowulf cluster (insert joke here). I don't see this as enough of a commodity product to support a reseller-type market. If you need a linux supercomputer of OTS gear, you probably have enough eggheads on staff to build and support it.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
According to most definitions of 'belly up': 1. (idiomatic) Dead or defunct, often used with go, went, or turn. (see go belly-up)
After several financial failures, the organization went belly up. I'm pretty sure that since SGI has slowly become a niche provider for creating solutions for a few specific customers, they see Linux Networx as another good partner in another niche market. SGI isn't at the greatness they once were but it looks like they're holding their own in what they are doing.
My work here is dung.
It means the future of Linux supercomputing will be backed by SGI. You don't think SGI bought an already dead company just to kill it, do you?
What does that mean? It means they decided they became irrelevant to the industry at some point or another, and they know they can't get back up there with superior technology and code, so they'll just buy the competition out so that people in the market have no choice but to go to them.
Weak company buys weaker company just to shut it down? Am I missing something? What percentage of the super computing market does SGI and Linux Networx have now? With the top 500 dominated by Linux systems I think Linux based super computing is in good shape. Sure customers that took a chance on Linux Networx MAY be screwed, but only because SGI isn't in a strong position to be around much longer. Someone who cares should look into the deal and the involvement of any LBO firms. Smells kind of SCOish.
I thought SGI was already dead.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The last time SGI bought a supercomputing company things did not go well. SGI has managed to shoot themselves in the foot constantly for over a decade. At one time, they were an industry leader (even have an Indy sitting before me now) now they're in trouble and know it. Their abandonment of MIPS and embrace of Itanium gained them short term benefits, but gutted the long term profitability and flexibility of the company. Now they're desperate for growth before the stockholders abandon them utterly.
Suggestion SGI, invest in new CPU's, the market is wide open for a solid x86 competitor now that PowerPC's given up the ghost there. Partner with Sun, use the OpenSPARC, make a consumerish-model that fits into customized Opteron motherboards, do something other than stand there admiring your own navel!
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Did they ever try to produce a graphics card?? It would have made sense.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
But does Netcraft confirm it?
Nothing I've heard, but as a Sun shareholder I would really like to see this happen. SGI is _cheap_ right now for the IP it has.
I miss IRIX too.....
Regards,
Website Hosting
The fewer vendors shipping shitty Linux clusters that don't work properly the better. I'm aware this opinion won't be popular here, but Linux is the Windows of the supercomputing world - the software overpromises, underperforms and is completely unreliable.
I waste so much of my life trying to get these machines to do relatively simple things that just work on proper supercomputers that it's just not funny. Sadly universities are sucked in by these vendors who claim they can provide them with a cheap alternative to a real machine and this in turn is killing off the proper vendors while making the users' lives a living hell.
I don't suppose SGI fancies buying out ClusterVision as well, do they?
Obviously, posting anonymously because I don't want to be fired.
As a local, and having had connections to that company they have always had management issues. I don't know for sure, but it doesn't sound impossible to me that they closed doors.
The economies of "COTS" "Consumer Off The Shelf" technology and the advancement of projects like MPI and PVM, as well as gigabit ethernet has made fast and effective clustering almost as easy as plugging in an Ethernet cable.
Seriously, while "programming" an application takes some chops, the infrastructure to run it is trivial.
"In my day" we had, at best, 10mbit ethernet. We had to use special drivers to get out "Dolphin Interconnects" working right. We had to really study the network topology to get the message passing right.
These days, forget about it. virtually all ethernet is interconnected via a switch so collisions are no longer an issue, switches don't cost thousands of dollars anymore, network interface cards use busmastering PCI or PCI2 (not ISA), The networks are 100x faster. The computers are 100x faster.
What's the point of a company who's products only tend to mitigate (not eliminate) the inevitable diminishing returns? Can you say buggy whip? Yea, sure, people still make them, but they are not in common use.
BUT... unlike their evil twin sister, LNXI is a pretty cool bunch of folks. I got to tour their facilities once (they were looking to contract some Linux training, and I was looking for a side job at the time. A couple of my former students ended up working there. :) ).
I gotta give 'em props... they were doing some pretty cutting-edge stuff at the time, and they probably still do. They also went out of their way to not be associated with the McBride gang, so IMHO they deserve to stick around.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I have worked extensively with their gear since the early 90's and watched their stock fairly closely for the past 7 years. They recently went backrupt and their cash burn rate suggests it will happen again in the not too distant future. It was sad watching the company get driven into the ground by management but so it goes...
Teh Lunix can never fail, it can only BE failed.
These guys obviously weren't doing it "right", because everyone knows that spending all your time working on something you give away for free is the path to wealth and fame.
SGI probably got the technology for pennies on the dollar. When a company closes its doors, the investors and creditors are left holding the bag, and they're interested in getting out from under a little bit of that debt, and do it quick. If they don't unload the intellectual property quickly, it decays, looses mindshare in the marketplace, and falls out of date. This is doubly true in the world of linux, where you have to keep up with the kernel changes, and the changing distributions.
Similarly, SGI has changed a lot of their focus from their expensive cache-coherent single-system-image servers to clusters of small/cheap nodes. SGI has great compiler technology, data-management software, and systems integration knowledge. They may not, however, have great systems-management tech. You don't need that for single-system-image machines. Even the big columbia machine at nasa is only a cluster of 20 machines. You can do a lot of stuff by hand, or with creative shell scripts, when you're dealing with 20 machines. With 400, it's tougher. I'm sure this won't solve all their problems, but I bet it will help quite a bit.
Chief Executive Officer
Bo Ewald joins SGI as CEO with over 25 years of relevant industry experience in the high performance computing markets. He is a seasoned industry veteran with a successful track record as a CEO. Rather interesting, don't you think?
Where have they been lately?
Are they cold at night?
Do they need food?
Have they been incarcerated?
Maybe I should make a donation?
-S
That works only if you can split the problem in totally independent chunks. Communication times are still very high with off the shelf components.
If the various parts of the problem require quick exchange of data very often, off the shelf computing fails miserably. In that case you need a true supercomputer, as in a single-OS-image machine, like the ones built by SGI, IBM, etc.
A case study: What caused LNXI to be popular, and what caused its demise?
LNXI, as Alta Technology, was the first commercial company to sell commodity-based Linux supercomputers... that was about 1996, to Brookhaven labs. These were 200MHz PII's running RH 5.0 (the buggiest RH ever).
By 2000, the company was full of ideas of where to run with the technology, but had no R&D money: Bernard Daines stepped in w/ a capital infusion that saved the company, and allowed R&D to put its money where its mouth was, and it did a great job.
By 2002, the company had their Clusterworx provisioning/monitoring browser-based software running, along w/ their ICEBox embedded device that concentrated serial consoles over the net and controlled power and monitored temperatures independently of the motherboard (still a better ides than IPMI), and the vertical blade-like design. Simultaneously, the company was no longer producing Alpha motherboards and had abandoned this type of R&D intensive, low margin, endeavor.
This software/hardware was LNXI's mainstay through ~2005. This wave was rode to the end.
The problem was: in ~2003, Bernard took control, and in doing so brought upon yesterday's demise of the company. As poor as subsequent management was, in 2003 he crippled the company in ways that no management could have averted.
In ~2003, Bernard had decided what future R&D would take place, with two extremely poor decisions:
1) The juvenile approach to software engineering: if it works, re-write it completely from scratch, and don't learn anything from the previous version, and add in "requirements bloat" too. That was the new Clusterworx. It was to be completed in ~2003... it still wasn't finished in 2005. In the meantime, the Clusterworx that worked well was allowed to rot rather than evolve (because the new Clusterworx will be ready any day now).
2) Start making motherboards again. This R&D effort was also to be completed by ~2003, but was finally stopped in 2006 when it still didn't work.
Subsequently, there was no continuation of the previous wave, the company had no choice but to flounder.
I hear Bernard was able to get much of his money back from subsequent rounds of investors.
... SGI was dead! Are they even relevant in today's computing market?
Clearly, the future of Linux supercomputing is in dire jeopardy.
As somebody who had to sit through a bunch of their product pitches over the last few years, I say "Don't let the door hit you in the butt on the way out."
LNXI were basically a smallish white-box vendor who wanted to charge IBM-like prices for commodity hardware strictly on the basis of their management software, which in reality was nothing special. To my knowledge, they didn't really have anybody working on storage/file systems, interconnect networks, scheduling, or any of the other really hard open problems in HPC. As a result, they were caught between mass-market vendors like Dell (who could undercut them on price any day of the week) and total-solution vendors like IBM (who did have a good story to tell about storage/file systems, interconnect networks, scheduling, etc.), with the predictable results.
How they ever convinced Boeing and several of the DOD major shared resource centers to buy their hardware, I'll never know.
If you worked for SGI, did you manage to get one of those chrome-plated diecast metal paperweight / desk ornaments that was a real life 3-D model of the SGI's famous wire cube logo? I once met one of SGI's VP's back in the 1990's who had one and showed it to me. When I asked where I could buy one and how much it costs, he just laughed at me and said it was a secret. Maybe only a select few senior SGI'ers were privileged to get them, I really dunno, but I sure wanted one for myself just because it was uber-cool. You'd think that by now that at least some of them would've showed up on eBay, but I've never seen one advertised, and only ever saw that one in person.
VIVA SGI!
*hugs his Octane2 and SW1600*
When in danger, whewn in doubt! Run in circles, scream and shout!
Well, my three coworkers and I were in Kansas City yesterday and today moving a cluster on behalf of LNXI. This was the last official LNXI job ever. Understand that 90 percent of field engineer work (cluster installations, repair, RMA work, etc.) was done by one subcontractor working for LNXI. I am not a pussy so I don't post anonymously, but I can't name it. However I was in the field acting as labor and fallout boy for the hardware and I spent a majority of my time doing Boeing RMA work for the last three years for them. I learned a lot and their technical staff (before Bo pissed everyone off) were second to none. So thanks LNXI, even though the prepaid hotel didn't work this time, we found out from the internets before you told us, and left three big node shipping crates onsite because you fired the motherfuckers who might want it back. Regardless, here comes the hate: The non technical management and venture capitalist pigs ruined a company that had a niche market creating supercomputers for the some of the best software developers in the nation. Bo ruined that by trying to compete with Dell, IBM, and the other souless fucking sellouts posing as friends of open source while forcing proprietary crap down everyone's throat. So for the next while I will assure their customers that the company that just fucked over a lot of people I admire will be fixing their stuff from now on and I am sure they will get treated better than us people. After all, I know supercomputers are worth more than staff, but for the love of God: SGI? You gotta be fscking /kidding me.
For those of you who insulted our company today through snide remarks, remember you can let all the 1337 open source software and cluster companies die and noone will be left to hear you scream as IBM/DELL/HP/SUN/Microsoft/SGI drags you away.
As the HPCwire article noted, SGI was most likely interested in LNXI's software, particularly Clusterworx.
I know personally several Minnesota-based LNXI engineers who accepted offers at SGI and are now working out of the Eagan office.