One wouldn’t have been able to tell looking at the huge Supercomputing booth, but SGI has been struggling for years. The company, whose machines were the mainstay of computational science, especially life science back in the day, and got this blogger through grad school, might just be on its final legs. Today, they received a delisting notice from the Nasdaq. Now, this is not the first time they’ve been in trouble, having filed for Chapter 11 in the past following delisting from the NYSE, so it’s entirely possible they will come out of it, but with the economy the way it is, and no real market for what they offer, I am not so sure. If it is the beginning of the end, it will be the end of a proud company that was once the epitome of visualization technology and built some of THE best computers ever made.
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Well back in the mid-nineties you needed SGI's and specialized operating systems to do serious computing…now with the multi-core desktops, and ultra-hackable Linux you can do almost what you can do with those specialized machines…and if on of that you add the hadoop et al. magic stuff that you can do with commodity hardware, then it's no surprise that SGI files Chapter 11…
i always loved the shapes of the boxen they made. the O2's in the lab just screamed “awesome” compared to the sun pizza boxes and everything else beige and square that everyone else was making.
I loved my two Octanes, which were heavily souped up. One was my main machine and the other my 100% computation box. Loved the way you could slide out the motherboard with minimum fuss and add memory, etc. Beautiful
I loved my two Octanes, which were heavily souped up. One was my main machine and the other my 100% computation box. Loved the way you could slide out the motherboard with minimum fuss and add memory, etc. Beautiful
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[...] December 10, 2008 — Richard by blakespot Industry watching: Is this the end?: [Via business|bytes|genes|molecules] One wouldn’t have been able to tell looking at the huge [...]