From the Editor | Main Blog Index
May 12, 2009
On Monday Rackable announced it had completed the acquisition of SGI, paying $42.5 million for the legacy computer maker. This follows the bankruptcy court's approval of the deal, which was granted on April 30. The only big surprise with Monday's announcement is that the company has changed its name to Silicon Graphics International, retaining the SGI brand.
The new company will include approximately 1,300 employees, more than 1,000 of which are from the old SGI workforce. A number of original SGI execs were retained, including Dr. Eng Lim Goh, the new CTO; Robert Pette, vice president of the visualization products; and Diane Gibson, senior vice president of operations. Rackable CEO and President Mark Barrenechea will continue in his role, and the board of directors will also remain unchanged.
According to George Skaff, the company's chief marketing officer, all customer contracts made under the old SGI will be honored under the new arrangement, including the recent $40 million DoD deal announced back in February.
It still remains to be seen how the former Rackable and SGI product lines will be merged. The original SGI Altix XE server line overlaps with Rackable's x86 offerings and according to Skaff, "between the two, one will survive." But for the most part, the product lines are complementary. The plan is to pick up all or most of the SGI's current offerings, with minor branding tweaks. In a statement from CEO Mark Barrenechea released on Monday: "The Rackable name will become the brand for the SGI x86 cluster compute products. Rackable will join our other industry-recognized brands -- such as ICE Cube, Altix, InfiniteStorage, CloudRack, MicroSlice, Origin, and VUE -- to comprise the new SGI."
Skaff said no decision has been made regarding the shared-memory, Itanium-based Altix servers, but this is undoubtedly one product line that the born-again SGI will look at very carefully. The use of high-end Itanium-based servers in HPC has continued to shrink, mainly at the expense of x86 servers. With the increased power and sophistication of the latest Intel Nehalem and AMD Shanghai processors, the performance gap between the high-end x86 chips and the Itanium is narrowing. And with the ability to aggregate memory and CPUs with ScaleMP's vSMP offering (and maybe someday with a 3Leaf solution), there is less of a case for maintaining an SMP platform based on a non-standard architecture.
In any case, the new SGI will have to figure out how to make ends meet in a cutthroat server market. The previous SGI regime was running deficits on the order of $100 million per year, a model that the new company would rather leave behind. Since the merger of the two organizations didn't dramatically reduce either the product offerings or total head count, the toughest decisions on how to balance revenue with operating cost lay ahead.
Posted by Michael Feldman - May 12, 2009 @ 3:01 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
![]()
Michael Feldman is the editor of HPCwire.
No Recent Blog Comments
In a recent solicitation, the NSF laid out needs for furthering its scientific and engineering infrastructure with new tools to go beyond top performance, Having already delivered systems like Stampede and Blue Waters, they're turning an eye to solving data-intensive challenges. We spoke with the agency's Irene Qualters and Barry Schneider about..
Read more...
Large-scale, worldwide scientific initiatives rely on some cloud-based system to both coordinate efforts and manage computational efforts at peak times that cannot be contained within the combined in-house HPC resources. Last week at Google I/O, Brookhaven National Lab’s Sergey Panitkin discussed the role of the Google Compute Engine in providing computational support to ATLAS, a detector of high-energy particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Read more...
The Xeon Phi coprocessor might be the new kid on the high performance block, but out of all first-rate kickers of the Intel tires, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) got the first real jab with its new top ten Stampede system.We talk with the center's Karl Schultz about the challenges of programming for Phi--but more specifically, the optimization...
Read more...
May 22, 2013 |
At some point in the not-too-distant future, building powerful, miniature computing systems will be considered a hobby for high schoolers, just as robotics or even Lego-building are today. That could be made possible through recent advancements made with the Raspberry Pi computers.
Read more...
May 16, 2013 |
When it comes to cloud, long distances mean unacceptably high latencies. Researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany examined those latency issues of doing CFD modeling in the cloud by utilizing a common CFD and its utilization in HPC instance types including both CPU and GPU cores of Amazon EC2.
Read more...
May 15, 2013 |
Supercomputers at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) have worked on important computational problems such as collapse of the atomic state, the optimization of chemical catalysts, and now modeling popping bubbles.
Read more...
May 10, 2013 |
Program provides cash awards up to $10,000 for the best open-source end-user applications deployed on 100G network.
Read more...
05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.
04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.
In this demonstration of SGI DMF ZeroWatt disk solution, Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI CTO, discusses a function of SGI DMF software to reduce costs and power consumption in an exascale (Big Data) storage datacenter.
The Cray CS300-AC cluster supercomputer offers energy efficient, air-cooled design based on modular, industry-standard platforms featuring the latest processor and network technologies and a wide range of datacenter cooling requirements.