The idea of having a preconfigured server shipped to you is old hat: Every server vendor worth its salt lets you configure a machine online before you buy it, and you get a finished system shipped right to your data center door. Customers in the high performance computing (HPC) market, where parallel supercomputers have been hand-made for decades, have had about enough of this. They want clusters that behave like, are preconfigured like, and sold like monolithic systems. These are so-called “bright clusters,” and supercomputer maker Silicon Graphics is partnering to target this fast-growing market with its Linux-based Altix machines.
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The University of Manchester invites the scientific research community to participate in a technical symposium on reconfigurable computing with FPGAs, to be held 21-22 February in the Michael Smith Building at the University of Manchester. As an exciting new area of research, this event gives attendees the opportunity to interact with other scientists interested in exploring the possibilities of using reconfigurable computing to accelerate their software applications through the exchange of ideas and experiences.
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In recent years, the model size of automobile design and analysis has become larger and more complex than ever before — from thousands of model elements in a single automobile design to millions of detailed elements. These influences have driven the need for high performance computing power with faster I/O, faster bandwidth and higher scalability in the automobile industry. To address these industry challenges, Hyundai Motor Company, the number one motor company in Korea, has purchased computing and storage solutions from Silicon Graphics Korea.
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Silicon Graphics (SGI) on Monday plans to unveil a new product line designed to make it easier for users with medium-sized computing needs to set up clusters of the Mountain View, California, company’s Altix 350 servers. Called the Altix 1350 clusters, the systems will be based on SGI’s Altix 350 servers. They will be pre-configured with the management, networking and storage technology required to cluster them. Customers will be able to cluster as many as 32 Itanium 2 processors into a single Altix 350 compute node, SGI said in a statement.
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Silicon Graphics (NYSE: SGI – News) today announced results for its second fiscal quarter, which ended December 24, 2004. Revenue for the quarter was $223 million, compared with $175 million for the first quarter ended September 24, 2004. Gross margin was 37.5% in the second quarter, up from 35.9% in the first quarter. SGI’s second-quarter operating loss from continuing operations was $9 million, compared with an operating loss of $26 million in the first quarter. The second-quarter net loss from continuing operations was $11 million or $0.04 per share, compared with a net loss of $28 million or $0.11 per share last quarter.
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