SiliconBunny

SGI Intros x86 Servers with QDR InfiniBand

Tom Kranz — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 19:24:34 +0000

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SGI today announced the first Rackable x86 scale-out servers to support both on-board Quad Data Rate (QDR) 40Gb InfiniBand and 10Gb Ethernet connections. Available immediately, the new servers also leverage advanced memory capabilities and Intel Xeon 5500 series processors to deliver advanced processing performance for applications that demand higher performance.

New Top500 list out

Tom Kranz — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 15:28:48 +0000

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Today is the start of ISC09, and as usual, a new Top500 list kicks off the action. IBM’s Roadrunner hangs on to the top slot, with Cray’s XT5 Jaguar still there in second place. SGI’s Pleiades system at NASA Ames is pushed down to fourth place, as the new Jugene Bluegene/P system enters at number 3.

The full list, with more details on each of the systems, can be found at http://top500.org/lists/2009/06

Dr. Eng Lim Goh speaking at ISC09

Tom Kranz — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:39:50 +0000

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Silicon Graphics will be have a stand and be showcasing their wares up the upcoming International SuperComputing 09 conference in Hamburg, Germany, at the end of this month.

Along with showing off the 10,000 core ‘Molecule’ concept, Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI’s CTO and all round Very Clever Chap, will be giving a talk on scaling up HPC Architecture to handle multiple core CPUs.

“Scalable HPC Architecture for the Many-Core Era,” presented by Dr. Eng Lim Goh, senior vice president and chief technology officer at SGI.

Date: Thursday, June 25
Time: 10:30 a.m. and 3:15 p.m. CEST
Location: Hall 3, Congress Center Hamburg
Topic: The IT industry has moved from the era of regular clock speed improvements to the new many-core era. This is a fundamental change to which even consumer PC users and applications will need to adapt. This session will focus on the implications for productive high-performance and clustered computing architectures.

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SGI® to Present at the UBS Global Technology and Services Conference

Tom Kranz — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 09:37:21 +0000

Looking for IRIX or Solaris expertise? Visit my UNIX Consultancy website.

One of the problems with Silicon Graphics was that, despite having some really scalable solutions, they never really focussed and sold into corporate data centres. HPC, sure, visualiation, no worries - but all those people buying Sun F15ks who needed big iron for that data warehouse? No chance.

Looks like the Rackable chaps have the right idea, though, and are taking the range of SGI solutions to town:

SGI (R) (NASDAQ:SGI), today announced that Mark Barrenechea, president & CEO, and Jim Wheat, chief financial officer, will participate in the UBS Global Technology and Services Conference in New York on Monday, June 8, 2009. Mark Barrenechea will present on behalf of SGI at 3:45 p.m. Eastern Time.

You can catch the full release here.

SGI® Deploys ICE Cube™ Modular Data Center at Colocation Leader i/o Data Centers

Tom Kranz — Fri, 29 May 2009 09:49:33 +0000

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It seems that data centres in a box are taking off in a big way, but SGI lead the field purely because they’ve chosen the best name for their offering - behold the ICE Cube.

SGI® (NASDAQ:SGI) announced today that it recently shipped its ICE Cube™ modular data center to i/o Data Centers, a leading colocation and data center services provider based in Phoenix, Arizona, to address i/o clients’ evolving data center needs. The ICE Cube is secured, powered and connected to i/o Data Centers’ network.

The specs are pretty impressive - an ICE Cube can hold up to 2,800 servers, fielding 22,400 cores. Or you can it it out with up to 11 Petabytes of storage.

With the rising cost of deploying data centres, and the increase in hype around cloud computing, we should be seeing a big increase in the deployments of these sorts of solutions.

Interview with SGI’s new CEO

Tom Kranz — Wed, 20 May 2009 07:56:22 +0000

Looking for IRIX or Solaris expertise? Visit my UNIX Consultancy website.

John West over at insideHPC has landed an exclusive interview with SGI’s CEO, Mark Barrenechea.

The article is a great read, and John gets some good information on the new SGI’s product roadmap, including news that the Silicon Graphics visualisation technology (the impressive VUE suite) still has a future.

Perhaps the best news is that SGI’s plan for an Altix system based on Intel’s Xeon processors, as opposed to Itanium, is still coming down the line. Itanium has always been a step backwards from MIPs, and Xeon beats it hands down in the price/performance stakes, optimised code or no. With SC09 coming up in November could we be seeing a product announcement?

Mark also has a blog over at http://ceoblog.rackable.com/ which is also worth your time. Another big positive for the new company - the CEO is happy to communicate openly on his company’s website, something Silicon Graphics should have paid attention to many years ago.

NASA Supercomputing Goes Green: Modeling Earth’s Ocean Climate

Tom Kranz — Tue, 19 May 2009 15:01:40 +0000

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NASA have been playing about with their Silicon Graphics supercomputers, using new models for more accurate climate change predication. By mapping the faces of a cube to the surface of a sphere, they’ve worked out that they get a higher degree of accuracy and more realistic modelling.

Climate modelling is one of the most resource intensive compute jobs you can carry out. NASA have been using their Silicon Graphics Columbia supercomputer for the initial simulation, and then moved to the more powerful SGI Pleiades installation.

You can read more - as well as watch a cool video with details of the visualisation - at this page on NASA’s site.

Silicon Graphics is back on the NASDAQ

Tom Kranz — Tue, 19 May 2009 08:47:45 +0000

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Perhaps not quite in the way many of us would have hoped, but SGI is once again trading on the NASDAQ. This is also one of the final steps of Rackable’s transformation into Silicon Graphics International.

Rackable Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:RACK - News) announced today the completion of its legal name change to “Silicon Graphics International Corp.” The company also announced today that it will change its NASDAQ stock ticker symbol from “RACK” to “SGI.” The stock ticker change has gone into effect for the trading community on Monday, May 18, 2009.

Full press release on Yahoo! Finance can be found here.

The SGI/Rackable deal is completed

Tom Kranz — Mon, 11 May 2009 13:32:52 +0000

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The latest on SGI and Rackable has come through via a press release from … SGI. Yes, as I speculated when the deal was first announced () Rackable are following Tera’s lead (when Tera bought the bones of Cray from Silicon Graphics) and have rebranded, keeping the familiar SGI name.

The headline news is that the XE products will be merged with Rackable’s existing x86 clusters (which was their core competency) and sold under the Rackable brand.

Existing high end techologies - like Altix, VUE, ICE, Infinite Storage etc. - will remain. The company is also positioning itself as a ’solutions provider’ - moving away from just selling tin, which should hopefully push sales, growth, and revenue.

At the moment, the main SGI site redirects to Rackable’s website, although things like Techpubs are still live and reachable. Customers should be re-assured that the product lines will continue with renewed vigour - how this affects the hobbyist community, independent consultancies, and IRIX users remains to be seen.

You can read the full press release here.

Apple hire Bob Drebin

Tom Kranz — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 07:31:44 +0000

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News has come through that Apple have announced the appointment of Bob Drebin as a senior director. Bob was a chief engineer at Silicon Graphics, where he was part of the group working with the Nintendo 64 chipset. When that group left to form ArtX, Bob worked on the design on the Gamecube’s graphics chipset.

ArtX was then taken over by ATI, where Bob become Engineering Director, After the merger of ATI and AMD, Bob became CTO of the graphics product group.

Now he’s left AMD to join Apple, and the question is - what are Apple up to? Bob is hugely experienced and had a hand in the design of some of the most compact and scalable graphics cores in the industry - why would Apple need such a tech heavy weight on their staff?

The most obvious answer is the iPhone - but with Nvidia struggling in the market place and Apple making a serious play for the high end workstation market, could this be the start of a new line of graphics chipsets from Apple, tuned for OS X?