SGI in the HPC world... (Score 1)

I work on a government installation. SGI has been used at our site on the HPC side and in the visualization department. The SGI machines, whether they be the 3800/3900 series (MIPS based) or the Altix series (Itanium based), have been great machines. They run the benchmarks well, and are popular with users. They are not necessarily the fastest machines (either MIPS or Altix), but there is more to it than just pure raw speed. Certain HPC machines run some benchmarks faster, but are a dog on other types of code. SGI's claim to fame is graphics (which they lost), shared memory (which they are losing), Single System Image (SSI), and NUMAlink. On the graphics side, there InfiniteReality4 (IR4) graphics pipes have 1 GB of memory available on it. The IR4 pipe ($100K) is over 4 years old now, and NVidia is rumored to be finally bringing out a similar piece in April for $8K. Of course, NVidia's and ATI have long surpassed the IR series for speed. Because of that, in 2001 we switched from SGI workstations to Wintel/Linux workstations. SGI has known this for quite some time, which is why they switched to using ATI workstation cards in their visualization machines. On the shared memory side, they are close to losing it as well. The best workstation today can physically handle 128 GB of memory. When SGI bid for our business, they proposed a Altix for several hundreds of thousands of dollars. They were then told that we could buy a workstation for less than $80K that could perform as well as what they were offerring. They were crestfallen when they found out what their competition could do. SGI has since made a better offer, and may yet win the business. On the SSI/NUMAlink side, they are still ahead of the competition. Really the shared memory, SSI, and NUMAlink are all tied together closely. SGI makes a nice acquisition target. The joke around the HPC community is that Cray will buy them. (SGI bought Cray, took the good items, then sold it back off. Cray is doing well now.) Why is SGI in its current position? 1. They lost focus in the Dot Com era, and have been struggling to to gain it back. Said another way, they had poor management. 2. They were squeezed from below by Wintel/Linux workstations. 3. They were squeezed from below by the Linux Cluster. 4. There is not enough money in the HPC world to support SGI, IBM, HP, Compaq, Cray, and Sun. Compaq was bought by HP. SGI will be bought by ??? SGI does have good talent. I personally know some of the engineers. Theoretically, SGI can survive. They just have to execute correctly (no more delays on the dual-core Itanium). The Altix is a good system. They have good government support contracts. Do I think that they will survive? Well, they have lasted longer than I thought they would. I expected them to die in 2001. Personally, I think that they will be bought by IBM (for the defense contracts) or HP (for the Itanium). But as you can see, I have been wrong for the past four years.