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SGI to Build Commercial Linux Supercomputers

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the penguins-in-the-computing-penthouse dept.

jfinke sent in a link - as did many others - to a brief Yahoo News story about SGI's plans to move into the parallel processing supercomputer marketplace with Linux as their base OS. "We're really pumped up about it," said Beau Vrolyk, senior vice president of SGI's product group. "It represents the beginning of a whole new generation of supercomputer."

5 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. SGI and Open Source by Cef · · Score: 3

    A lot of SGI's products (the open source ones) are aimed as toolkits for system management, or are aimed at increasing performance and stability (XFS).

    One such project is a toolkit for obtaining system performance statistics. They write the toolkit, and give it away for free, and then they write the management tool that sits on top of it, and sell that!

    And how better to know just what your cluster of machines is doing, than with monitoring software? And produced by the same company that sold you the hardware? Why not?

    By giving away the toolkit (and it's source), you end up with free improvements, free ports to other platforms, and toolkits that monitor stuff you may never have even thought to monitor in the first place, broadening the scope for your product.

  2. It's a lot more than hype... by Ami+Ganguli · · Score: 5

    Even without SGI, Linux is becoming more scalable with each release. Now SGI is investing real money in the Linux kernel. They're working on projects aimed at implementing the best features of Irix under Linux. It won't happen overnight, but it won't be that long either.

    It makes a whole lot of sense financially (especially for a company that needs to cut costs). They can let the Linux community take care of all the mainstream features that every OS must have, and SGI can focus on the handful of things that are really important to their particular market. Even if SGI ends up being the only maintainer of ccNUMA for Linux, it's still cheaper than having to maintain the entire OS.

    The other exciting thing about Linux is the mainstream applications that are emerging. I know people don't buy an SGI box to run spreadsheets, but it's nice to know that you don't have to keep a Windows PC around just for the odd time you want to run an office productivity application. Linux lets SGI ride the wave of new mainstream developments while still catering to their niche market.

    --
    It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
  3. getting rid of multiple boxes by timothy · · Score: 3
    Ami Ganguli wrote:

    The other exciting thing about Linux is the mainstream applications that are emerging. I know people don't buy an SGI box to run spreadsheets, but it's nice to know that you don't have to keep a Windows PC around just for the odd time you want to run an office productivity application. Linux lets SGI ride the wave of new mainstream developments while still catering to their niche market.


    I think this is an important point.

    When NT started to (self-declaredly) encroach on what had been UNIX workstation territory 3 or 4 years ago, one of the arguments that MS made on its behalf was that people wouldn't need to have a separate box on their desk for common office (read "MS Office") tasks.

    This aspect is one of the things that was hyped in The Analysts' reports (Brown? IDC?) finding lower TCO for NT than for UNIX machines. Now that there are some Web-based application suites semi-available (and more poised to be really available RSN ;)), the idea that anyone would really need a separate box for tapping out a memo is getting sillier anyhow.

    StarOffice, for Free? Heh! Running on a multi-processor SGI sytem? That sounds just about right ...

    timothy

    p.s.(And one day there will be a funny graph of IDC opinions, with an inflection point around this year ...)



    --
    jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
  4. Re:Are you calling Alan Cox a liar in public? by Foogle · · Score: 3
    Nope, I'm not calling Alan Cox a liar. I'm just a cynic. After all the Mindcraft crap we went through, I figure I'd be a hypocrite to accept benchmarks from anyone except an unbiased source. It's not a personal issue, it's just the way I operate.

    -----------

    "You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

  5. Re:I really don't think sgi is as pro-linux we thi by mmontour · · Score: 3

    Last night the Vancouver Linux users group presented a talk by Dr. John Mashey from SGI. It was a very interesting talk, and convinced me that SGI does "get it" and is truely dedicated to Linux and the open-source concept.

    I don't think that MIPS/Linux is a priority for SGI. They see MIPS/Irix at the 'top' of the market, and Intel(x86 and itanic)/Linux at the 'bottom' but moving up over the next few years. They know it's coming, and they'd rather spend resources to influence its development than be a passive by-stander as they are with NT. So, they feed features and ideas from IRIX into Linux, while continuing to sell and maintain the high-end IRIX systems as long as there's still a market (which consists more of corporate uses like automotive crash-test simulation than of TV and movies).

    He also said that several of SGI's customers want Linux, and want certain features in it (like raw I/O for big databases). So, SGI either helps develop this and keeps the customers, or loses them.

    The XFS filesystem is one of their major contributions, and he said that one of the main delays there is that they are going through the code to remove any sections that could cause patent headaches in the future. One hopes the result will be slightly more usable than the initial Mozilla...

    ---
    disclaimer: these were my impressions of Dr. Mashey's talk; they may or may not actually represent his views, which may or may not be those of SGI.