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SGI Announces New Strategy and Alliance
the_demiurge writes "SGI has three press releases on their site showing the new Positions for the Future. They include making separate divisions for the Cray line and the Visual Workstations and also more details on the 'strategic alliance' with NVIDIA." SGI is also getting into Open Source in a big way. Check this page for all sorts of cool stuff.
make sure you preserve permissions and things when using tar.
cp -av works nicely too (assuming gnu cp)
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
> Why for the sake of GOD, does sgi not distribute
> a compiler for free with its OS? This is a very big issue...
Bzzt! 6.5 comes with gcc *and* necessary libs - you don't need to buy the IDO to get them any more.
Well, it is sad that sgi is firing people... I am sure there is some fat in the firings, but I imagine there are alot of people that have work/coded/concepted endlessly and are now being given the boot... sgi is a great reference, I cannot believe that those with skills who are being booted cannot grab another job easily...
Issues:
Why for the sake of GOD, does sgi not distribute a compiler for free with its OS? This is a very big issue that everyone I know who codes on sgi's(self include) gripes about(gcc wont do it, libs,.so's,etc)... That is such a destructive attitude to have on a system that has such a small base and software base... I remember getting one of the first indys and having almost no software...
Why did sgi what until 1999 to go to the desktop graphics card market with Nvida... why did sgi have to wait until its engineers left to go form there OWN companies(3dfx etc)... sour grapes.. I hope something good happens now tho...
Alias|Wavefront is the jewel performer of the company IMHO... port those (full versions) products (Maya,PowerAnimator|Studio) to every OS that is cost effective to port to...
Adobe integration, If your OS doesnt run the Adobe products, or run them WELL, the desktop base will suffer(no gimp cries here please... I like gimp, I use gimp while in linux)... Adobe is the bread and butter... what person has NEVER used photoshop and what production house DOES NOT have photoshop?
I like sgi, I think they deserved a much better market share and growth than they have gotten...
but it seems, sadly, its not about quality, but quantity....
And in fact InsightII has also been on IBM AIX for many years. Not that I'd ever want run MSI software on AIX myself, but it's been there all along.
If you look closely, MSI like many other ISV's has other plans, like shifting to a web-centric way of providing apps.
I am a computational scientist (as opposed to a computer scientist), who doesnt know much about kernel type stuff; however, I see the 2GiB (?!?) memory limit is currently a real limit for ia32 linux for large problems.
Intel has a pag e that says describes its Extended Server Memory Architecture (ESMA) that extends the limit to 64GB, and says they are "working with the community" to get this into the linux kernel.
I have no idea what this means.
SGI's bigmem patch seems to be a little step in the right direction.
My question to anyone who knows: Is large memory support coming anytime soon??
Not exactly. Kernel changes involving changes to existing modules is required by GPL.
Choosing to not compile a module and replacing it with a closed-source binary-only version is allowed, and a way I'd guess some companies may choose to go in the future to provide value-add.
And I don't necessarily think that's a *bad* thing.
I can actually think of some viable strategies for SGI that match their current actions. Don't discount them yet. Of course, any of those strategies will take a few years to realizes, so in the meantime, cost cutting is the way to go.
As Lucas noted in a reply to my original post, SGI has been (and may still be, arguably) the de facto leader in the graphics world. Without them, we wouldn't have OpenGL or a whole whackload of stuff that I'm sure exists, but I'm not aware of. It's nice to have dedicated leaders in market niches (like SGI was), if only for the standards they introduce (GL). Monolithic players (M$) tend to use standards more as a way to compete with their rivals' standards for marketshare (AOL-IM).
Besides, it -is- the last gasp of a giant... The new SGI is going to be smaller, leaner, and meaner, right? As long as IRIX fans don't storm their HQ.
Wah!
This move is both a smart move and desperate move to stay alive. I'm personally not counting SGI out, not by a long shot.
Wah!
SGI isn't dropping Irix in favor of Linux quite yet. Linux isn't as scalabile as Irix, and Irix elitists have plenty to be elitist about.
SGI sees that the development costs of Irix are quite a financial drain to them. They are in the hardware business, and developing software is a necessary cost to stay in that business. Now, someone at SGI got a clue, and noticed that if they played their cards right, they could have someone else absorb those costs for them (the Linux community). Linux isn't quite up to Irix's specs yet (won't do the job at all on a 256 CPU workstation). SGI's strategy seems to be to develop Linux over the next couple of years to the point where it's as good on their hardware as Irix, and presumably backwards compatible with Irix. In essence, they'll try to make Linux a superset of Irix.
At that point, they can drop Irix, phase over to Linux, and development costs fall dramatically. However, this says little about where Linux is today, compared to Irix.
A small note: although the above sounds like SGI is exploiting Linux, it's not. Linux really wins from this deal, because SGI invests big bucks to bring it up to Irix's level of scalability. It looses nothing. Both sides win from this partnership.
- pmitros
Linus' attitude is that if you want more-than-32-bit addressing, you should get a real 64 bit platform.
I hope SGI's new strategy works out well for them, and I would also like to thank them for their current contributions, a pretty darn good set I may add. AC
Oh well, so much for being able to be used in other operating systems. I guess they're not terribly friendly to "open source" after all..
Take the something from the high end at VAResearch, and compared it to a low end SGI (maybe an O2). But don't forget the hidden costs (SGI's wonderful support contracts, fees, licences for this and that, etc...).
That's the area where I have seen people pay for the SGI name, but would have been better served with a Linux box. But, heh... we still have a Personal Iris in use here, because it works better as a Xtermial than a Linux box (OpenGL support for one reason, graphics in general, although a good 486 will blow it out of the water for CPU preformance).
Register article
news.com article
AP Business article on Yahoo
I wish I could do a
grep -v 'sentences containing synonyms of "focus on our core business"'
It sure would make it quicker to read.
I submitted this earlier today, but it didn't get posted.
A message on the XFS Open Source Site has some new information. XFS is going to be released under the GPL.
See their PDF Doc on what this release will cover. It looks like they are holding back the real-time multimedia features of XFS, but that's about it.
Some source is already available for download, the rest will be up as soon as they clean up the source code for GPL'ing.
--
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
I was at the conference where they announced this, & I figured I could head off some angry comments about SGI taking control of Linux or whatever. John "Beau" Vrolyk was very clear that they want Linux to continue as a single entity, and have no plans to issue their own versions to incorporate their changes. If the rate of adoption of IRIX features into the Linux kernel is too slow for them, they'll implement the same features in overlays until their code actually goes into the kernel.
I hope that clears it up.
As far as a converter, well... probably not for a while.
--
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
Is anyone thinking of a Ext2 to XFS filesystem converter? OK, I can see instant problems with this; how do I change the root filesystem without killing everything?
Could anyone tell us what benefits using XFS would bring to the typical Linux desktop user? Increased Speed?
OK, better reliability and faster fsck's, but apart from that?
----- Documentation is worth it just to be able to answer all your mail with 'RTFM' - Alan Cox.
what part of going out of business appeals to you?
I'm sure the 1500 people getting laid off are impressed with the new strategy. SGI is still nowhere near the road to recovery.
I really like the direction that SGI has taken lately(aside from the foolish name change). Their focus on open source has been great. Now, as a Cray T3e programmer, I have a request: Please update the MPI libraries to MPI2 compliance. For those of you who aren't familiar with parallel computing, MPI(Message Passing Interface) is the industry standad for parallel computing. It can be used on a single processor PC all the way up to a 2048 processor T3e with little porting overhead. The problem is that nearly every implementation is of the older 1.2 implementation. MPI2 allows for trmendous speedup. If both Cray and MPICH, a free implementation, go to MPI2 compliance, then Beowulf clusters could fit more easily into many research environments. As it currently stands, the code bases for Supercomputers and clusters remain seperat entities in many cases. MPI2 would solve this. Oh well. Just my obscure wish, though.
neutrino
History has the relation to truth that theology has to religion-i.e. none to speak of. - Lazarus Long
How long do you think it will take for XFS to become a standard in the Linux community? Anyone?
Dunno, but as long as there aren't any funky restrictions then I would imagine that XFS will become a standard very quickly.
Personally, I'd reformat my Debian Potato Install for this. Anyone (in the know) care to comment on when we'll see XFS in a Kernel tarball?
Do not read this
How long do you think it will take for XFS to become a standard in the Linux community? Anyone?
Wah!
And all slashdoter's are worried about is
the IRIX source code. You people are sad.
Oh yeah:
"this logo's for you!"
I agree as well. SGI could really cut down on overhead by adding all their cool IRIX stuff to the Linux kernel and then abandoning IRIX altogether. That way they can focus on hardware and they have a cheap OS that is maintained for them. Maybe the prices of their workstations will drop.
:-)
Plus, Linux on an SGI box would make it a helluva lot easier for me to get that Indy up and running at work
Geoff
I've been looking around the SGI website and it isn't immediately obvious to me who to write to at SGI to thank for all these wonderful Open Source donations. Anybody have email addresses that we could slashdot with thank-yous?
I really like the direction that SGI has taken lately(aside from the foolish name change). Their focus on open source has been great. Now, as a Cray T3e programmer, I have a request: Please update the MPI libraries to MPI2 compliance.
Nobody (that I know of, anyway) has a complete MPI-2 implementation. There are a few MPI parallel IO implementations out there (PVFS, ROMIO, and one from IBM whose name escapes me), and one of the free MPI implementations (LAM) has the new dynamic process allocation mechanism. Nobody's implemented the event model and some of the other stuff though, because a lot of it is hard to do and there hasn't been that much user demand. It's hard enough to convince users to port to MPI-1.
If anybody knows of an MPI implementation that implements all of MPI-2, I'd love to see it.
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
One may ask the rather pertinant question for SGI, where are the profits in the computing industry?
If you compare it with other industries, two models usually work, high volume & thin margins or a specialist niche. Big players like IBM have discovered that the PC market is basically a money drain within their corporate structure. I think SGI are discovering the same phenomena with their smaller volume of sales. The big problem is that their traditional primary market (graphics) has suddenly shifted into the mainstream PC workstation range and until they can define/create a new market for their high-end wares, are effectively losing customers at the margin which is hurting them as they have longer product cycles than the current disposable PC (when you get a 486 chip in mobile phones/PDAs with shelf life of 12-18 months, you know something is crazy).
Personally I see them releasing people wholescale as a bad move as their core strength is in the knowledge that their staff carry around in optimising software for high-end kickass machines. SGI could provide a valuable service by hiring their people out to other companies in order to tune specific applications to go like the hammers of hell and provide a cost-effective hardware platform and software APIs to support them. In other words, loosen the reins before they jump ship. Without the skills and detailed know-how of coding to the wire, we will otherwise be left with bloatware relying on Moore's law to progress.
Economists have concluded there are several ways of making a guarenteed profit, rent-seeking monopoly (no guesses here as to the most successful culprits), efficiency differential between low and high cost providers, permanent gains due to unique technological breakthroughs and inelastic demand. As SGI is in no position to be a monopoly and their cost structure is inappropriate for a high-volume box shuffler, IMHO their long-term hope is to develop/morph new technologies, and spin them and associated staff off into as many subsidiary companies as quickly as possible to gain the capital appreciation. Given the rather dynamic, coopetitive and fluid nature of the computing market, I suspect it is easier to ally with siblings than with potential competitors.
Well, if not then the fate of DEC is illustrative of one path that SGI could face.
LL
Well, currentlly, to get the newer versions of IRIX you need a support contract. Sure, they will probably have one for Linux. How are they going to not be in violation of GPL and prevent you from upgrading Linux on your own without paying them?
Patches in less than 12 hours? Like the filesystem corruption bug that cropped up in 2.2.10 and still hasn't been fixed?
Building on changes that started 18 months ago, SGI today announces a series of initiatives and partnerships that will enhance the company's position as the leader in high-performance and visual computing. These actions will accelerate SGI's transition from a vertically integrated company to one committed to broadening its market reach by leveraging its technology through new partnerships with industry leaders.
I realize that's the opening paragraph of the press release, so we'd expect it to be vague. But if you replace the "SGI" with another name, it could be used to describe the re-org of any high-tech company. I'm in awe of the ability of marketroids to come up with completely meaningless fluff like this.
Just because SGI has decided to embrace Linux dosent mean they are dying. In many respects, it is a very cost effective measure. Even IBM is turning to linux in a big way. Simply put, it is cheaper for SGI to port the few high end features from Irix to Linux for there IA-32/IA-64 servers then it is for them to port the whole of Irix over. in addition to this, there customers get the benefit of patches for problems in under 12 hours from when it becomes public knoledge. also, they will get quite a few good features from peaple outside of SGI. Simply put it is cheeper for them to use Linux then Irix. There are probably very few peaple that buy an SGI machine just because it runs Irix, from what I have heard, Irix can be rather buggy to work with. Dont count SGI out yet. I personaly think that this is a smart move by SGI, not a desperate move to stay alive...
It would have been nice if they had released it under a true open source license.
Oh, this will be fun... Finally I will get to say "I told you so" to some people who thought SGI was the only way to go, and Linux wasn't even something they could consider.
What I wanna know is how the SGI ISV's are going to handle this news. Like MSI who have always been "we only port to IRIX" kind of people.
Thank you SGI!
The choice of the GPL license is also another smart move. The GPL is a great license for this kind of technology, as it will ensure the freedom of the code for everyone and make it resistant to proprietary forking. I may not be an expert of license reconciliation but I don't see with the *BSD operating systems won't be able to use XFS? Is it simply impossible to include a GPL'ed filesystem with a BSD OS?
I'll bet that 18 months from now we'll all go: "How did we ever survive with out it [XFS]?".
I personally will use it the second it comes into the kernel tarball.
LINUX stands for: Linux Inux Nux Ux X
FRA: STFU GTFO
First off, the GNU part would just be the tools, not nearly as important as the kernel or the hardware. Second, they've made it clear that they intend to operate as "value added resellers" and that one reason for focusing on Linux instead of NT was that it's harder to lock people into your own proprietary tools with MS's OEM restrictions--I don't think crediting anyone else is in the gameplan :) The other issue is that not ALL kernel work would have to be released if they didn't want to... They can hold things back if they're not using them in distributed kernels--but I do think that statement was largely intended as a distraction to avoid the proprietary distribution issue.
Great choice of license, truly 'giving' back to the community.
"better ways of doing things eventually just replace the inferior things" - Linus Torvalds 09-08-07
Actually, I am refering specificly to thier Insight package that they aquired when they bought out BioSym, and which has always only been an IRIX product. MSI has ported some of thier products to other OS's, so that wasn't a totally fair comment.
Sharing kernel changes is legally required by the GPL, but I wish SGI volunteerly will support and give some credit to the GNU project, if they will use GNU components in their distribution.