this should be fun. modern SGI x86 systems are heavily supermicro based.
OMG: HPE gobbles SGI for HPC. WTF?
Hewlett Packard Enterprise has bought venerable computing firm SGI – formerly Silicon Graphics – for $275m. Over the past few years, SGI has concentrated on the big-iron end of the server market and high-performance computing. It's this technology that HPE wants to bolster its hardware lineup. "At HPE, we are focused on …
COMMENTS
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Friday 12th August 2016 09:57 GMT ToddR
SGI use Supermicro.
I don't think so. The 1U and 2U stuff was designed and built by Rackable, with rear air cooling of 2 x back - back systems.
The shared memory kit is designed and built by SGI in Chippawa Falls I believe. They use there own motherboards in order to add their proprietary Numalink interface which provides the ccNUMA capability.
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Friday 12th August 2016 06:11 GMT smartypants
It was games wot done for it
SGI lost its foothold when bog-standard PCs with graphics cards developed primarily for gaming started to dramatically outperform their offerings, destroying what up to then was a lucrative business selling desktop workstations to the creative industries.
I developed on a variety of SGI machinery throughout the 1990s, beginning with the "affordable" Personal Iris (about £25k), but at least it came with a flight simulator!
They were generally great to use, but by the end of the decade, the desktop machines started to seriously lag in terms of outright power, let alone price, and the company entered the first of its bankruptcies.
The world seems a very different place today.
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Friday 12th August 2016 19:11 GMT Michael Strorm
Re: It was games wot done for it
The story paints this as the sad end of a long-established graphics pioneer. In truth that already happened seven years ago when the original company went bankrupt and Rackable Systems bought them out.
That's mentioned in passing, but it's not made entirely clear that the present day "SGI" (i.e. the one now being taken over by HPE) *is* essentially Rackable- which renamed itself after the company it had just bought- and not the original.
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Friday 12th August 2016 06:28 GMT Anonymous Coward
The New 'Innovate' HPE way
will be to lay off 99% of the workers who have not thrown in the towel within 3 months of the deal closing.
Sad day. Sad for SGI and sad to see HPE floundering about like this.
The people who work there deserve better.
Posting AC as I have family who are unlucky enough to work for HPE (until the end of the month when they get let go).
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Friday 12th August 2016 08:21 GMT amanfromMars 1
Stealthy Imperial State Actors are Novel ESPecial Agents ‽ .
And so the old stalwarts all die out - to be replaced by the young and foolish...
Ignore and try to deny there be also the brave and the brash at their work, REST and Greater IntelAIgent Gamesplay at your peril, Anonymous South African Coward.
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Friday 12th August 2016 10:22 GMT dajames
Re: OMG HPE BUY SGI FOR HPC WTF
I do get your thinking, but technically it should be "BUYS" as HPE is a single entity ...
That would be the US usage, yes. In British English it is acceptable to regard a compound entity grammatically as either a single whole or as the sum of its parts, so "BUY" works fine over here.
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Friday 12th August 2016 10:07 GMT hoola
Why is it so bad?
HP simply outclass everyone in the midrange HPC field. Much if this is down to the blade systems and more recently the Apollo kit. If HP is so bad at HPC, why do people keep buying it? It is not necessarily price because competitors can be cheaper but the solutions and support mediocre. This purchase actually makes a lot of sense as it enables them to push the low volume very high performance solutions that SGI do but failed to make any money on. It is no longer possible to be a high-end niche vendor as the development costs outweigh the revenue. If much of this ends up in The Machine then things could get even more interesting.
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Friday 12th August 2016 12:06 GMT smartypants
Re: I could swear...
That's from Jurassic Park.
On the right of the monitor is an SGI workstation - more are visible too. This link provides the details:
http://www.sgistuff.net/funstuff/hollywood/jpark.html
ILM (who did the effects) used SGIs extensively, using software like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avid_Matador
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Friday 12th August 2016 11:58 GMT Alistair
This will make for interesting meetings
At least, for a couple of the folks I know in the hardware sales biz. Friendly competitors they are at the moment, will now be in the same house.
I recall supporting two of the toasters. Surprisingly robust little boxes. Waaaaay too old to be left unattended. It took several months of 'help its broken' calls and lectures of the manager types before they went back to the software vendor and found out that the latest iterations now ran on linux.
The clustering software and OpenGL stuff, and I believe that SGI also gets some credit for a file system or two.... *sigh*
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Friday 12th August 2016 13:37 GMT Dave K
How the mighty have fallen
It is a sad day to see how much SGI have fallen - even if the current SGI is just Rackable with a new name. The real SGI died back in 2009. I still have 3 old SGI workstations at home for occasional pratting around on (an O2, Indigo2 and a Fuel), and for the mid 90s, their kit was legendary for what it could do, and how it looked. It was sad to see just how quickly they imploded once PCs began to eat into their core market.
Of course, the number of management mis-steppings were also huge. The early announcement to shift to Itanium (combined with cancelling future MIPS development) way before Itanium was even remotely ready to ship (and when nobody had any idea how it'd perform), and of course the even more disastrous decision to settle with NVidia and give NVidia free access to all SGI's graphics patents. All decisions which just accelerated their decline.
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Tuesday 16th August 2016 13:52 GMT Lennart Sorensen
Re: Bye, Bye, pretty SGI
Nope, since SGI got rid of MIPS long ago, and tried to move to the Itanium. What a disaster. So now the company that did the least bad with the Itanium (and consists of two companies that threw away good CPU designs to move to the Itanium) is buying one of the others that was essentially destroyed by moving to the Itanium.
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