Hewlett Packard Offers $275M for Silicon Graphics International | Hacker News Reader

Hewlett Packard Offers $275M for Silicon Graphics International

marketwatch.com

3 pointsdohqu8Zi4 comments

I was confused... thinking Rackable bought SGI... until Wikipedia article showed me that Rackable took on the SGI name in process. Now HP wants to buy them. NOOOOO!!!!!

That's my first reaction. I doubt they'll turn down the money but HP has a habit of destroying things with good potential. They had a good RISC CPU that they and Intel turned into the Itanic. They acquired OpenVMS but threw it away instead of spinning it off. They're now about to acquire the source of some of the greatest workstations and NUMA machines ever made. And probably trash it somehow.

I don't know. Maybe I'm paranoid. SGI was just one of my favorites and their NUMA tech is still awesome. Hate to see it get death-by-acquisition.

Don't forget HP also bought Tandem. Who were doing big distributed systems (including a distributed SQL database) in the 1980's. Thankfully, HP keeps their technical documents database online[1]. Including the classic five minute rule paper.[2]

I still have fond memories of SGI systems. I've had Iris PRO's, Indy's and O2's over time. Their NUMA systems Origin/Onyx were amazing. and they had C++ compilers with usable error messages!

1. http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/ 2. http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/TR-86.1.pdf

Tandem was one of the exceptions. They at least keep updating NonStop. It's still the best in fault-tolerant systems that I'm aware of. Need to do a new survey in that stuff sometime to see if academics or startups have exceeded it yet.

Thanks for links. Didn't have them.

EDIT: Thanks twice given one of those links may have answered a question kragen had in another thread about why no heap allowed in passive, process pairs. I'm thinking they're stateless whereas the active ones are stateful. Heaps need stateful.

They had 2 RISC CPUs (Precision and Alpha). I miss Alpha.

There's not much demand for really large-scale NUMA any more, at least not enough to keep an organization of that size alive. The rest of the HPC biz is just racking and cabling whatever Intel, NVidia and (sometimes) Mellanox give you. It's a margins-based race to the bottom and many of the people in that business are indeed, bottom-feeders.

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