Those paying attention to Silicon Graphics history will recall Dr. Eng Lim Goh back in 2004 talking about Project Ultraviolet – a supercomputer that used different types of processor types in a single frame. Although the original white paper has vanished from the SGI site, archive.org has a mirror available here.

The idea of HEC Architecture (High Efficiency Computing) and Multi-Paradigm Computing is a good one, and we’ve already been seeing the fruits in that, specifically Altix gear with FPGAs, and the rise of the GPGPU. Is the current Project Ultraviolet the same beast as the one outlined 5+ years ago?

I mentioned back in February the possibility that, with Tukwila delays and Nehalem processors having a NUMA interface, the time was ripe for SGI to put Nehalem Xeons into the Altix.

Now that Rackable have taken over the shell of SGI and have finalised their product offerings, we can see an interesting mix of processing power. Rackable have both Opteron and Xeon in their gear, whereas the (old) SGI had Xeon and Itanium.

With the Nehalem Xeons having the QuickPath interconnect, and Opteron always having had the NUMA HyperTransport, is now the time for Itanium to be shown the door?

HPCWire and InsideHPC (who know their stuff and are well worth a read) seem to think so. Even the eternally inaccurate TPM at The Register is agreeing (top tip, Timothy – NUMAlink is not a ‘cluster’ interconnect).

Xeons and Opterons inside the shared memory Altix make a lot of sense – immediate cost savings, the chips already have NUMA interconnects so not too much engineering required, and an instant boost in apps and developers.

Existing Itanium customers aren’t going to be too happy, but I’d point people at John Mashey’s excellent essay on the design behind the NUMAflex architecture. These machines were designed to be flexible, to swap CPUs without having to swap the frames, I/O subsystems, and everything else, thus protecting the customer’s investment in the technology, and lowering the price (and pain) of upgrades.

SGI CEO Mark Barranechea has re-confirmed the company’s commitment to Itanium on his blog – but with so many existing customers running on Altix gear, it would have been a PR disaster not to.

I think it’s clear that the next Altix cc:NUMA system will be based around Nehalem Xeon processors. The odds are good that we’ll be seeing an Opteron version as well, and it’ll be interesting to see how that stacks up against offerings from Cray.

As for Itanium? I think we will be seeing a Tukwila based Altix next year sometime. After that, I doubt very much we’ll see future Itanium kit from SGI.

Jim Clark is a true entrepreneur. He didn’t get lucky with one company – he’s founded and been involved in a number of successful businesses, a few of which you may even have heard of …..

Jim founded Silicon Graphics based on his pioneering work in computer graphics at Stanford University. After growing Silicon Graphics into a heavyweight that ruled the graphics and effects market, he went on to join Netscape.

The San Jose Mercury News have managed to score an interview with him, and I highly recommend you give it a read. There are very few tech visionaries who can repeat their success, but above and beyond that Jim is a very clever chap with a solid background in engineering.

The vision of Silicon Graphics was certainly mine. I taught the seven other founders computer graphics. The so-called Graphics Library, which now (as the OpenGL) is in practically every computing product on the planet, was the outgrowth of my teaching computer graphics for almost 10 years.

An interesting thing is that Jim is equally candid about what he did wrong as well as what he did right – a good lesson for any of us running our own businesses.

Microsoft was founded the same year as SGI, and they both went public in 1986. I had the experience of my own foolhardy opinion of the PC in those days — that it was a “toy” unworthy of the attention of real computer scientists.