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.

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.

Read more at HPCWire.

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

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.

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.