SGI to Build Commercial Linux Supercomputers

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."

Comments

It's a lot more than hype...

[Ami Ganguli]

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.