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SGI Lives On, In Name At Least
Hugh Pickens writes "In a surprise corporate move, after Rackable Systems received bankruptcy court approval on April 30 to close its purchase of SGI, the company announced on Monday that the deal had closed and that the combined company would be called SGI — short for Silicon Graphics International instead of the original Silicon Graphics Inc. The revival of the SGI brand will certainly please people in Silicon Valley with a historical bent, as SGI has been one of the area's true icons. However, some consider this a curious turn of events, considering that Rackable has come to represent the new guard in the server market, while SGI has struggled for years. Executives hope the name change will help it expand its business overseas, where SGI is a better-known brand. The new SGI will also continue to develop and support the high-performance computing systems that Silicon Graphics was known for, says Rackable's president and CEO. 'There should be no disruption to Silicon Graphics customers.'"
Rackable is a small server vendor with revenues in the hundreds of millions while they big boys in that space (HP, IBM, Dell, Sun) are in the billions.
They build x86 based rack servers. They're focus seems to have been in high density rack systems. I think one of their first/biggest innovation was creating a half depth chassis so you could put two servers back to back in a 1u space leaving a hot air plenum in the middle to keep things from getting overheated. They also have 12V Motherboards like Google uses on their systems.
The goal of Rackable isn't to sell you one x86 server, it's to give you a solution including a rack full of their servers. That seems to have also been the focus of SGI lately. They went from big single systems to clustered super computers. So the deal appears to make sense. I'm sure there's a lot of good talent and patents that Rackable could use to help it become a bigger player.
In 2007 Rackable's 4 biggest clients were Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon and Facebook.
The name change might be good because SGI is a more recognizable name in the industry. I think some people see Rackable as an x86 server vendor but they're really a server farm vendor.
The past couple of years haven't been great for Rackable with some pretty big losses in proportion to their revenue so they need to make some bigger moves and this might do the trick.
Dual Opteron < $600
There was that 3d filesystem navigator that was used in the Jurassic Park movie.
That was fsn, which has been cloned.
They make some claims as to have "given back" to the linux community
Well, they were the first to port Linux to a serious parallel architecture. Still not many vendors that will support a 512-core and 1-kernel system...
About the giving back: http://oss.sgi.com/projects/ if you want to check
Everything SGI has sold over the last couple years runs linux.
I think Linus mentioned somewhere in his blog (or in some interview) that SGI people have contributed code to improve scalability of the kernel.
Apple has "Mac vs PC", Microsoft has "Laptop Hunters", Linux has recession
They're an HPC company now, have been since Onyx was discontinued quite a while ago. The first generation of Altix had a graphics version (The Prism), but it used COTS graphics cards and was only ever modestly successful at making them work through their NUMALink backplane technology. In essence it was only ever useful because it could have a lot more CPUs than a PC of the day did. It's graphics were only so-so, but it could preprocess a lot of data before rendering it. Made it somewhat useful in scientific visualization. That was discontinued three years or so ago, and was pretty long in the tooth even then.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
IRIX license comes with your machine. You don't have to buy another one (aside from fact they wouldn't sell it to you). Just get install media (support.sgi.com for instance - last free offered overlay is 6.5.22). though, you will have to have 6.5 original install media. In this case I can only advise eBay or torrent (demonoid has one nice 2.5gb torrent with all 6.5 stuff + more).
When most people talk about IRIX, they're really talking about the GUI, which is 4Dwm, and there's an on-going porting effort here.
Max.