Russia’s Federal Service for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring (Roshydromet) after a thorough evaluation and rigorous procurement procedure has deployed Silicon Graphics solutions to rapidly develop detailed models that enable more precise weather forecasts. The systems operate at 27 trillion operations per second, providing 10,000 times the computational power of Roshydromet’s previous Cray supercomputer. This enhanced capability has expanded both the forecast duration and the accuracy of these critical forecasts.

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With markets drying up and R&D budgets taking a pounding, both Silicon Graphics and Nvidia are facing some tough times. Nvidia are being squeezed in the chipset arena by both Intel and AMD/ATI, and their graphics biz is taking a hit from AMD/ATI and also their recent production issues.

With a number of staff leaving SGI to work at Nvidia, Quadro’s presence in SGI’s visualisation systems, and Nvidia looking more and more to move into high end visualisation, how long will it be before the two companies get together?

A partnership – or even a full merger – would benefit both companies enormously, and allow them to merge R&D spend and come up with some really innovative solutions for high end visualisation problems. CUDA and discrete GPUs as processing units seems to play into SGI’s strategy for mix-and-match processing (see their use of FPGAs in Altix) and with Altix ICE taking off even more, such modular solutions could provide a compelling solution for many different vertical markets.

Will it happen? I think it should, and I forecast that we’ll see some movement in this direction in the coming year, as the economy gets worse.

Revenue for the second quarter was $82.8 million, compared to $92.8 million in the previous quarter and $90.1 million in the second quarter of the prior year. The company’s net loss for the quarter was $49.2 million, or $4.24 per share, versus a net loss of $33.7 million or $2.91 per share last quarter and $42.2 million or $3.78 per share in the second quarter of the prior year.

Three interesting things came out of the call:

1. SGI have reached an agreement with existing creditors, who’s debts were supposed to start being repaid in December, to postpone this for 2 years. Obviously this will have a positive effect on cash flow.
2. There was another round of layoffs (restructuring, external promotions, reduction in force – call it what you will) at the end of December, so the financial hit for that comes in this quarter
3. Despite receiving another NASDAQ delisting notice (see Deja Vu – Silicon Graphics to be delisted from NASDAQ), given the tough times all business is facing, the NASDAQ has relaxed it’s rules and SGI are no longer in danger of being delisted (again)

Read the full Silicon Graphics financial results release at http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2009/february/results.html

Ireland’s most powerful computer was installed in three hours and powered up in just one day, thanks to a rapidly deployable computing platform from Silicon Graphics,Inc.(SGI) (NASDAQ: SGIC) that is transforming what users can expect from supercomputer deployments.

Installed in November at the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC), “Stokes,” a new SGI® Altix® ICE 8200 system that operates at up to 25.1 trillion operations per second, is rankedNo.117 on the Top500 list of the world’s fastest computers. Perhaps more significantly, the latest ICHEC supercomputer delivers 87.6 percent of its peak performance when running the LINPACK benchmark — the best efficiency of any industry-standard system appearing in the list’s top 225 systems. This remains a serious factor for scientific and engineering institutes that use MPI and seek to minimize run times, processor counts and power use while maximizing job throughput.

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It looks like Intel will be pushing the next version of Itanium, Tukwila, out the door in the second half of this year. Issues with DDR3 look like they’re resolved, so it looks like a firm date.

But the usual Itanium suspects – SGI and HP – are strangely quiet. Silicon Graphics in particular use Itanium in big boxes – we’re not talking off the shelf kit here, they have a long lead time and the sales process is equally long. So it would make sense for SGI to be talking to customers now about Tukwila equipped Altix 4700s – 6 or 8 cores on a 1024 processor machine is serious bragging rights.

This raises the interesting possibility that Silicon Graphics will be (finally) dropping Itanium, and instead going for Nehalem Xeons in the big Altix gear, utilising their nifty Quick Path Interconnect.

With all the financial woe going on, this would make serious cost savings for Silicon Graphics – I think we’ll be seeing some interesting product announcements this year.