Silicon Graphics International isn't the same company as the old Silicon Graphics, Inc. It's a renamed Rackable Systems after they bought up what was left of the old SGI:

http://www.sgi.com/company_info/overview.html

Long Before Simpsons famed Symour from theNAM, there was Older symour, named Cray, whom started Control Data near Univ of Minn or maybe home. Moved to Wisc & Vaarroooom.

Now whats Cray Got that Linuex needs, Supercomputers. Face off. Big Band Machines:

CRAY Vs. Blue Waters. Pwr 7 is nodal & new inerconnect maake Duel Brutal. Mer 48 Core & Yore here:.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/25/cray_xe6_baker_gemini/page2.html

As SSD SLC Reaches Strenght, new cache for 200,000 IOPS class or step up to class.Class. BIG Links, Blazing DAT & now Cut: theARRAY, Word. Call IT Array World.

Will IBM Sc Out of Chicagos' NW'Stern Moumbo labs Do Cray After Pityfull fall from Barcelona. NEW & Improved units has Scorchers & Pant Starchers, Running Magny For New VINdication.

Done by Local Linuex Teamster PENGEE' Class.
Here: ThomassTEWARTVON drashek supercomputer wizzaeerde'

Clearly, Latif is on the SGI payroll. After identifying SGI as a victim of "multiple bankrupcies" he falls all over himself claiming the moribund company's use of Linux is some kind of visionary ploy. Nowhere in the article is the cost of the SGI system discussed. And to suggest that Cray is leading edge is laughable - they repurpose commodity processors and suck on the government tit while losing gobs of money every quarter. If it weren't for a few friends in Congress, Cray would have gone the way of Braniff and US Steel.

Thanks for that info. Still impressive for SGI. Let's hope they can turn that into increased sales.

The OS was in fact SUSE and the 4096 cores did include virtual cores. 2048 actual cores with hyper threading.

It was a tremendous win for the Greater London LUG to get that talk. It was also combined from what I understand with the Unix User Group.

It makes me sad that the market for exotic computers like NeXT and SGI has disappeared completely. Even Sun Microsystems and IBM have stopped making RISC workstations because no one was buying them anymore.

Particularly, coming from a company with about 4-5 quarters' worth of operating cash at its present burn rate and no evidence of the structural change required to improve the situation.

You're quite right. Skimmed past that one. However, SGI will certainly not allow this to go out to commercial clients unless SGI is thinking about doing a custom SGI distribution. They will probably take whatever tweaks they did and run them upstream for the various distros (including the ones SGI supports such as SUSE and Red Hat)to take advantage of.

Or perhaps they could keep it proprietary...I guess we will see.

From what I gather it is not a distro but a kernel compiled from source hence the comment of

"the fact that SGI has managed to get the standard Linux kernel, available from the kernel.org repository"

You know you can build your own custom linux box without downloading an ISO from a specific distro. Have a peek at this site it will explain and even give a basic how-to:

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

Cheers

is so far ahead of Windows in every measurable way. Windows is a toy, a bad joke of an OS, that appeals only to l33t teenage gam3rs.

My mobile phone of 2030 has more processors and memory that that machine. How quaint.

I had an SGI 240 GTX as my personal computer, with 4 processors and 256MB of memory back in 1991. A real Bad Boy for its time.

I'm curious as to what distribution of Linux Goh was using. My guess would be Suse Enterprise Linux. SGI has had a close relationship with them for some time now even going so far as to offer Tier 1 Customer Support for Suse. They do not do that for Red Hat if I am not mistaken.

Also, those 4096 processors, were those physical or the combination of physical and virtual as seen through the Nehalem's use of Hyperthreading?

Great article. But please fix the tags. ;)