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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There’s long been a rumour going round that the Silicon Graphics laptops in Twister were a real product, developed internally, and killed off without seeing the light of day. An SGI laptop is one of those recurring urban legends that everyone wishes was true. You could indeed get a Silicon Graphics laptop, but not in the way everyone thinks.

Twister

The laptops in Twister were fakes. They were mockups made by the special effects department, build around a Silicon Graphics Presenter display wired off-screen into an SGI Indy.

You can read the full story of the effects in Twister on Banned From The Ranch’s website – have a look at http://www.bftr.com/Pages/projects/twister.html

SGI product placement dictated that ALL of the computers in the film had to be SGIs, so we had the task of making not only two distinctly different sets of graphics for nearly every scene, but different-looking EQUIPMENT between the two teams. This was nowhere more evident than with the SGI “laptops,” which of course didn’t exist. With the tireless dedication and help of Dan Evanicky at SGI, we were able to design and build two different fake laptop shells around the SGI Corona LCD flatscreen displays, with seven functional and seven dummy cases for each design, we had a handful to take care of; each “laptop” had a powerful custom backlight run off a separate 12-volt DC power supply and multiple cables which ran back off the set (often through mud and puddles) to the Indy CPUs which fed them.

Congo

Silicon Graphics Indys were used throughout Congo. The TraviCom datacentre featured Indys on the desks – complete with Indycam – as well as the 17″ SGI granite CRTs embedded in the walls and littering the desks.

There was also a mockup Indy laptop that was used in the field by Laura Linney’s character. Again, this was rigged up by the special effects team.

The O2 laptop

When the O2 was being designed and built, some of the team decided to build a laptop around the O2 parts. You can see some screenshots, pictures of the machine, and some background story on the project at http://www.jumboprawn.net/jesse/projs/laptop.html

This was a one-off special build by the engineers working on the O2, and sadly never made it into production.

Military Indys

CRI are a company that build ruggedised military spec machines – essentially taking high performance Silicon Graphics kit, and giving it the full industrial makeover. At the moment they do rugged rack mounted Fuels, but back in the past they also created a rugged Indy laptop.

The old product page has been archived – check out the LinC3D 75-FS Indy laptop.

They were all destined for military use, and doubtless will one day show up at government surplus auctions. Popular rumour has it that one has been up in the space shuttle to the ISS, and that they were also used in ships by the US Navy.

These were the only production SGI laptops made, and they weren’t even made by Silicon Graphics. Given the high price of the Tadpole SPARCbook machines in the 1990s, I shudder to think how much these would have cost. Damn cool though.

Silicon Graphics have just announced that more global shared memory is available with fewer CPUs on their Altix 4700 systems. Increased DIMM density now means you can get an Altix 4700 with 2TB of memory, with only 8 processors.

If you’ve got applications that require large amounts of memory but not much in the way of compute-intensive processes, this is very good news indeed.

Global shared memory is memory which is accessible from all processors/cores. So in an SGI Altix with 1024 processors and 4TB of RAM, any one of the 1024 CPUs can access any part of that 4TB of memory. This is due to the design of Silicon Graphics’ large scale systems, which are Single System Image (SSI) machines – all resources are shared.

Clusters work in a different way, where each node has ‘local’ CPU and memory, and this can’t be accessed from another node.

Both SSI and clusters can scale, but in different ways and with different workloads. Shared memory jobs, where you’re doing lots of memory I/O and you can peg your dataset in physical RAM, don’t scale well with clusters, whereas rendering (where discrete jobs can be chopped up and executed in batches) are just right for clusters but not SSI machines.

With lots of memory density enhancements coming down the line, I’m wondering when Silicon Graphics will break through the 4TB system memory barrier?