
Hewlett Packard Enterprise to buy SGI - wyldfire
http://fortune.com/2016/08/11/hewlett-packard-enterprise-sgi-supercomputer/
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davepeck
Aye, the sad saga of the name continues.

My first job after college was working on data visualization software at SGI
in Mountain View. Today, these buildings serve as Google's headquarters.

For me, SGI was a dream job at a dream company!

Disruption interrupted that particular dream, it would seem.

~~~
bluedino
I wanted to work at Atari. They went out of business. I wanted to work at DEC.
They went out of business. I wanted to work at SGI. They went out of business.

~~~
thanatropism
Where do you want to work now?

~~~
pavlov
I hope it's Oracle.

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xs4ndro
Nice tip!

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wise0wl
SGI brought us so much that we still use today. I use XFS as the default
filesystem on all my machines (the AMI's I use in Amazon even use it). I hope
HPE finds a good home for the best of the best that still stuck it out at SGI
all these years (through the downturn, the Rackable years, and after).

A company I worked at previously bought a bunch of Rackable systems JUST after
the SGI acquisition, and we insisted that they include SGI badges with the
systems because, in my words, the logo was just way cooler.

~~~
nickpsecurity
Didn't they also put in the NUMA stuff in Linux kernel? Also, cutting
bottlenecks between CPU's and GPU's that happens today was a large part of how
their early boxes achieved their performance. PC architecture just looked dumb
after you saw how SGI boxes did it. Also, _might_ consider them an early
inventor of blade systems if you look at a SGI Origin with case open and a
blade box. Lining up a bunch of modules in one chassis with shared power, data
bus, pluggable hardware, and management system are both systems MO except
SGI's had single-system image. That's if blades did come later, which I'm
fuzzy on.

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Steeeve
And here I've been completely oblivious that SGI was still a company all these
years. (I guess it's not the same SGI, but still)

~~~
bsharitt
I did HPC work for the DoD a couple of years ago and a good chunk of our
supercomputers were from SGI.

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acveilleux
The supercomputer Cray/SGI business was the only surviving bit and basically
DoD and other TLAs are the only buyers.

I suspect it's mostly the Cray networking topologies (T3D/T3E double-taurus
with 2048+ cpus) that kept them relevant. The processors were just plain
alphas and later Xeons I think.

~~~
lallysingh
MIPS then Xeons.

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ajmarsh
The SGI O2 was one of the best looking workstations ever designed. I still
have mine, gutted with a x86 Linux box inside but still.

~~~
amyjess
I still haven't seen any modern-day cases that look nearly as beautiful as
SGI's designs.

Even simple desktops like the Indigo2 had _style_ , and then you had oddball-
looking beasts like the Tezro that really pushed the boundaries of what you
can do with a computer case.

I miss SGI. The real SGI, that is.

~~~
Theodores
I have a personal Iris, an Indy, an Indigo2 and one of those useless PCs they
brought out. Didn't get as far as having an Onyx 'Infinite Reality' at home,
however, all of those boxes definitely had coolness that nothing else had
during that era. The Susan Kare icons and Indigo Magic desktop with 'cpu-
eater' desktop wallpaper was totally awesome, completing the look. Even the
fonts were totally ahead of everything else.

In my opinion the Google Pixel is the only contemporary machine that has
design edge that is envy worthy. I don't have the 'ludicrous speed' edition
(yet), I am slumming it with the 2013 version but still utterly delighted with
my '4Gb ram' machine.

The original SGI boxes didn't run any software that mere mortals used - no
Photoshop, MS Word or anything else consumer grade. The Google Pixel is a bit
like that too, allegedly you cannot run anything but a web browser on one.
Mine runs a linux dev stack very nicely so, for me, I am still using 'winterm'
style terminal windows with 'vi' much like back in the day with SGI boxes.

With things that are cool they are either cool to those that understand these
things or they are cool to a wider audience, e.g. non-technical folk. My Pixel
does impress mere mortals with the screen, the sound, the keyboard, the
trackpad and the 'chrome' lights on the lid. Nothing else presents such a rich
audio-visual experience in the laptop form factor. In mini-tutorials and
working meetings I find the Google Pixel helps with the task in hand whilst
projecting cool, albeit at a fraction of the awesomeness of an SGI box back in
the 90's.

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DannyBee
Every time someone new buys them, i gain some renewed hope that one day,
somebody will update the address SGI used for contact info in the source code
they've released, since all of those questions end up going to me.

(see, for example:
[https://github.com/Lingcc/open64/blob/master/osprey/libm/ata...](https://github.com/Lingcc/open64/blob/master/osprey/libm/atan2ftab.c))

~~~
cdibona
Ain't never gonna happen. People still mail the fsf at the old address and
they moved like two decades ago.

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AndyNemmity
SGI is the best in the enterprise business when it comes to support, and large
scale systems for in memory computing. Have worked with many of the people
there, and they are very talented.

Hopefully the HPE buy allows them some space to continue the support and
quality they are known for.

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nickpsecurity
SGI was the company that knew we needed machines that could do 16cores & tens
of GB of RAM in one desktop/server all the way up to 2,048 threads w/ 3+TB RAM
in single image with tools handling workload. Their engineers knew it but we
didn't. Their management applied their creations in many of the wrong ways.
They missed the key market for that kind of desktop hardware.

Web apps. What SGI was doing every day on "high-end" boxes is pretty-much the
minimum specs you need to run these modern web pages and applications with
responsiveness that matches my Windows 98 on Pentium 2 experience. We have the
IRC app with 100MB of RAM. Apps with 50+ dependencies w/ cut & pasted code +
lots of temp files that RAMdrives might speed up. Even more if I get into
containers and such where at one point people told me I needed a VM for each
version of each app, library, or kernel plus one to debug the hypervisor
itself. Plus updates while system was running. All that might eat up 16 cores
and 64GB of RAM pretty fast. So, SGI's forward-thinking engineers got busy on
the monsters packing 6TB and such. And "visual workstations" \+ FPGA's to
accelerate the JavaScript engines for games, CAD, and Adobe Photoshop.

Such forward-thinking architecture. I mean, they're possibly the only ones
that got it right. Only HP's gifted management sees this. They know more
browsers, JS engines, clouds, and Nintendo games are coming out. So, they're
getting ready by dropping several hundred million on the visionary company
that stayed ready for it. Smart move.

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gsmethells
Our local Wisconsin university, UW-EC, received an entire computer lab full of
SGI workstations in the 90's when SGI was big. I even had a friend who worked
at SGI in Chippewa Falls, WI. I recall lots of folks fleeing to Cray (same
city) over the years. It's sad to see SGI falling apart like this, but
hopefully HP is a good home.

~~~
wavesplash
Silicon Graphics was bought by Rackable for pennies back in 2009, Rackable
then changed its name to SGI. The SGI of old is long gone.

~~~
rootbear
Not entirely. The SGI rep who serves NASA Goddard is still the same guy, after
who knows how long.

We have an SGI UV300 system, which has a single kernel image running on 96
cores with 6TB of RAM. Not many people build systems like that these days. The
newest expansion of the Goddard supercomputer uses SGI servers. I wish them
well as part of HPE.

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jrnichols
I loved the old SGI stuff. I remember back in the Netscape days (the buildings
on Middlefield & Ellis) we had a whole bunch of Indys, Indigo 2s, o2s, Onyx
boxes...all kinds of stuff. Loved the design, always had fun with IRIX, and of
course, the Netscape browser.

Seeing that HP is buying up what's left does make me a little sad, but it's
not a bad trip down memory lane. The Silicon Valley was fun for me back then.

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bogomipz
I had no idea SGI was still around. Does anyone know if IRIX is still around
in some capacity as well then?

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rootbear
It would be cool if they could release it as open source. There were aspects
of IRIX that I really liked.

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effie
Could you give some examples? Perhaps it could inspire people to enhance
current OSes.

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bbgm
Through most of grad school, I had two SGIs on my desk (well one was under).
Both were SGI Octane's, still my favorite machine of all time. But it was
pretty clear by the time I got done that SGI was falling behind, and they
should NEVER have shipped a WindowsNT workstation.

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mark_l_watson
I used to love using SGI Feality Engines. Both Disney and Nintendo provided me
with top end REs when I did projects for them. Amazing hardware and the
software was also very good.

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CompuHacker
I'd like to see a new PC with the SGI name on it, or maybe a laptop. And a 4k
successor to the 1600SW LCD display.

... I'd settle for a mousepad, though. Or maybe a mug.

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pavlov
Apple has competently filled in SGI's spot in the workstation market: the Mac
Pro is a $5000 computer with outdated 3-year-old components and a very stylish
case.

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bsg75
But it runs OSX, which is the reason some people are willing to pay that much
for that configuration.

Those who need something with newer components and at a lower price can easily
source a different machine and operating system.

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honkhonkpants
That's pretty much the only reason anyone bought an SGI workstation over most
of the company's first incarnation as well. For some reason they were forced
into using Irix, so they had to buy one.

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alayne
That's not my understanding at all! SGI had state of the art graphics (and
other A/V hardware) at the beginning. At the end of the workstation market,
commodity hardware got to the "good enough" level for a lot of people. A
number of SGI engineers went to Nvidia.

~~~
honkhonkpants
At the end of SGI's first life, PC hardware was running rings around Irix
workstations. The O2 was basically the slowest machine you could buy at the
time. Where I was working at the time we switched our PRO/Engineer machines
from SGI to whitebox PCs as soon as PTC ported to Windows NT. A dual-CPU
Pentium Pro with Fire GL Pro absolutely smoked the O2 and Indy machines it
replaced. So that was my experience, a shop that bought SGIs as long as they
were the best platform for a particular software package, and threw them out
at the earliest opportunity.

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planteen
Does HP now represent about every company that was going to use Itanium? DEC,
Compaq, SGI

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grabcocque
That moment of confusion when something you thought was long dead turns out
still exists.

