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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?"
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?
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.
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.
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