Hewlett Packard Enterprise to buy SGI | Hacker News Reader

Hewlett Packard Enterprise to buy SGI

fortune.com

86 pointswyldfire82 comments

Aye, the sad saga of the name continues.

My first job after college was working on data visualization software at SGI in Mountain View. Today, these buildings serve as Google's headquarters.

For me, SGI was a dream job at a dream company!

Disruption interrupted that particular dream, it would seem.

Google is the dream job of a lot of people now :).

Same feeling, here. In 1998, I interned in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, working for SGI acquisition, "Cray Research, a Silicon Graphics Company". From 2000-2005, I worked in Sacramento, California, for HP, in a division which would later get split off into HPE.

I wanted to work at Atari. They went out of business. I wanted to work at DEC. They went out of business. I wanted to work at SGI. They went out of business.

Where do you want to work now?

I hope it's Oracle.

Yeah, them or Fox News.

Nice tip!

I'd also like know which companies I should short.

I know quite a few people that have pretty much stayed working in exactly those same buildings for 25+ years.

Same window, same view, same job, new business cards.

Hazy memories: electropaint; doing some graphics with my housemate after a grateful dead concert. (I seem to recall playing with the water worm from "The Abyss" and its texture map having been the interior of The Tied House from downtown mountain view.)

When I graduated in 1995, HP and SGI were the dream job companies. Over the years as their fortunes started fading, I would see them slowly consolidate. SGI went down the progressively smaller offices over the next two decades. I think an SGI site in Mountain View are now used by Google HQ and another HP site down by Cupertino will soon by Apple HQ. Maybe there is a legacy being passed through each respectively ;)

Sun SPARCstations were cool too.

Yeah forgot about Sun...

And Apollo. And Thinking Machines. And Lisp Machines / Symbolics.

SGI brought us so much that we still use today. I use XFS as the default filesystem on all my machines (the AMI's I use in Amazon even use it). I hope HPE finds a good home for the best of the best that still stuck it out at SGI all these years (through the downturn, the Rackable years, and after).

A company I worked at previously bought a bunch of Rackable systems JUST after the SGI acquisition, and we insisted that they include SGI badges with the systems because, in my words, the logo was just way cooler.

Ha. The lower-case "sgi" isn't the real SGI logo to some of us :)

Didn't they also put in the NUMA stuff in Linux kernel? Also, cutting bottlenecks between CPU's and GPU's that happens today was a large part of how their early boxes achieved their performance. PC architecture just looked dumb after you saw how SGI boxes did it. Also, might consider them an early inventor of blade systems if you look at a SGI Origin with case open and a blade box. Lining up a bunch of modules in one chassis with shared power, data bus, pluggable hardware, and management system are both systems MO except SGI's had single-system image. That's if blades did come later, which I'm fuzzy on.

And here I've been completely oblivious that SGI was still a company all these years. (I guess it's not the same SGI, but still)

I did HPC work for the DoD a couple of years ago and a good chunk of our supercomputers were from SGI.

The supercomputer Cray/SGI business was the only surviving bit and basically DoD and other TLAs are the only buyers.

I suspect it's mostly the Cray networking topologies (T3D/T3E double-taurus with 2048+ cpus) that kept them relevant. The processors were just plain alphas and later Xeons I think.

MIPS then Xeons.

MIPS then Itanium then Xeons. A lot of companies rode the Itanic because it looked so high-class. One, good result is you can get an Itanium server on ebay for about $120 if it's a small SGI. I kind of smiled and winced when I noticed that trend.

Those were likely former Rackable Systems clusters, which bought and renamed itself SGI. Sadly, I think that all that's left of the old SGI is the name. Even the HPC magic they had I believe originally came from Cray -- another name from a bygone era.

Cray still builds fairly impressive single-image Limux machines. Not as pretty as their forerunners, but impressive on their own.

You're right... I was thinking back to 2000's SGI. It's hard to track of when / where these companies are. SGI buys Cray, SGI spins Cray out to Tera, Rackable buys SGI, HP splits, HPE buys SGI...

It's all crazy.

But yes, Cray still has some impressive gear independently.

They are for sure not single image machines. Each node is running its own kernel, sees only its own resources and is scheduled by the system-wide batch scheduler node. Running across nodes requires MPI to tie things together (tenuously) at the application level.

If they are impressive, it's only because of physical size and aggregate resources available, not because there's the least bit of magic involved. It's the usual Intel+-NVidia CPUs/chipsets/etc. At the current time, it's mostly their legacy proprietary interconnect.

Could I have confused those with, oh the irony, some SGI machine? I remember someone had single-image boxes with up to a thousand CPUs. I assumed it was something derived from Cray's T3E.

I know - and still reasonably valuable

This comment (on my favourite SGI enthusiast forum) might explain why: http://forums.nekochan.net/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=16730962&star...

I like the fact VMS is still supported.

Supported by who? SGI's Itanium boxes or HP after acquisition?

There is an x86 Port effort going on.

Yeah, it's through an outside company they licensed it to after killing it. That's the good news. The bad news is it was a tough port the other times, not a big market, and who knows what cut they get. I hope the company pulls it off but it's a tall order. Only the start of what needs to be done to get OpenVMS competitive, esp on usability.

Likewise! I learned Iris GL on an SGI, back in the day. I thought SGI had been ground to a fine powder and snorted by Larry Ellison, but it turns out that's not the case.

Sounds like SGI (Silicon Graphics Inc) went bankrupt April 2009. The name and assets were then bought by Rackable, who then adopted the name SGI (Silicon Graphics International).

Exactly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics,_Inc.

I think some company bought SGI after a bankruptcy and the renamed itself SGI. Sort like what happened to Cray.

Rackable.

The SGI O2 was one of the best looking workstations ever designed. I still have mine, gutted with a x86 Linux box inside but still.

That's another thing good about them. They were stylish. Not many were back then.

Another feature I liked was two motherboards. I didn't get to buy one but I figured you could theoretically get extra reliability out of it.

>> They were stylish. Not many were back then.

The 90's were full of stylish cases. Maybe it's just nostalgia but there were so many cool looking computers back then.

SGI did make them another level of cool. Purple computers! Even something like an Indy that was just going to sit in a web farm looked cool.

Maybe I missed them but most of x86 market that I personally saw was dull beige or black boxes. The SunBlades, SGI, and Next Cubes were neat. What else I miss outside outfits doing custom boxes like Alienware?

The BeBox, Macs (in particular the PM 9600, G3 towers), HP Kayak workstation is one of my all-time favorites...

I still haven't seen any modern-day cases that look nearly as beautiful as SGI's designs.

Even simple desktops like the Indigo2 had style, and then you had oddball-looking beasts like the Tezro that really pushed the boundaries of what you can do with a computer case.

I miss SGI. The real SGI, that is.

Some of the macs since the original imac aren't too bad either.

Most modern computers are too cheap to be able to build them with high quality components, and the margins razor thin.

Adjusted for inflation even high-end modern desktop PCs are 10x cheaper than low end Suns and SGIs of the 90s ($10k in '96 $s is >$15k in modern $s).

The G5 PowerMac cases were quite stylish and nice to work with.

I have a personal Iris, an Indy, an Indigo2 and one of those useless PCs they brought out. Didn't get as far as having an Onyx 'Infinite Reality' at home, however, all of those boxes definitely had coolness that nothing else had during that era. The Susan Kare icons and Indigo Magic desktop with 'cpu-eater' desktop wallpaper was totally awesome, completing the look. Even the fonts were totally ahead of everything else.

In my opinion the Google Pixel is the only contemporary machine that has design edge that is envy worthy. I don't have the 'ludicrous speed' edition (yet), I am slumming it with the 2013 version but still utterly delighted with my '4Gb ram' machine.

The original SGI boxes didn't run any software that mere mortals used - no Photoshop, MS Word or anything else consumer grade. The Google Pixel is a bit like that too, allegedly you cannot run anything but a web browser on one. Mine runs a linux dev stack very nicely so, for me, I am still using 'winterm' style terminal windows with 'vi' much like back in the day with SGI boxes.

With things that are cool they are either cool to those that understand these things or they are cool to a wider audience, e.g. non-technical folk. My Pixel does impress mere mortals with the screen, the sound, the keyboard, the trackpad and the 'chrome' lights on the lid. Nothing else presents such a rich audio-visual experience in the laptop form factor. In mini-tutorials and working meetings I find the Google Pixel helps with the task in hand whilst projecting cool, albeit at a fraction of the awesomeness of an SGI box back in the 90's.

You miss cool stuff like this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuMSk_S2ARI

I still prefer the Frog Design Suns, the beige and purple line.

But, of course, the SGIs had 90's written all over.

Decent amount of design pr0n here http://www.frogdesign.com/about/history.html

The image scroller circles look bad under white background.

It was the first UNIX box I had that booted directly into X. That, and the man pages were kept up to date and didn't suck. It set a standard for me that took a long time to match.

> That, and the man pages were kept up to date and didn't suck.

I think OpenBSD was released on the same date and they kept the man pages up to date, too.

The sad state with documentation with any GNU/Linux distro beside GuixSD cos GNU Info, is alarming.

I like to think about SGI designing the O2 on previous SGI workstations. Dogfoodng.

I thought the Octane was a pretty sweet looking machine, too. I remember thinking it looked like it was from the future.

Those suckers were incredibly heavy too. It felt like the chassis was made of cast iron or something.

Every time someone new buys them, i gain some renewed hope that one day, somebody will update the address SGI used for contact info in the source code they've released, since all of those questions end up going to me.

(see, for example: https://github.com/Lingcc/open64/blob/master/osprey/libm/ata...)

Ain't never gonna happen. People still mail the fsf at the old address and they moved like two decades ago.

SGI is the best in the enterprise business when it comes to support, and large scale systems for in memory computing. Have worked with many of the people there, and they are very talented.

Hopefully the HPE buy allows them some space to continue the support and quality they are known for.

SGI was the company that knew we needed machines that could do 16cores & tens of GB of RAM in one desktop/server all the way up to 2,048 threads w/ 3+TB RAM in single image with tools handling workload. Their engineers knew it but we didn't. Their management applied their creations in many of the wrong ways. They missed the key market for that kind of desktop hardware.

Web apps. What SGI was doing every day on "high-end" boxes is pretty-much the minimum specs you need to run these modern web pages and applications with responsiveness that matches my Windows 98 on Pentium 2 experience. We have the IRC app with 100MB of RAM. Apps with 50+ dependencies w/ cut & pasted code + lots of temp files that RAMdrives might speed up. Even more if I get into containers and such where at one point people told me I needed a VM for each version of each app, library, or kernel plus one to debug the hypervisor itself. Plus updates while system was running. All that might eat up 16 cores and 64GB of RAM pretty fast. So, SGI's forward-thinking engineers got busy on the monsters packing 6TB and such. And "visual workstations" + FPGA's to accelerate the JavaScript engines for games, CAD, and Adobe Photoshop.

Such forward-thinking architecture. I mean, they're possibly the only ones that got it right. Only HP's gifted management sees this. They know more browsers, JS engines, clouds, and Nintendo games are coming out. So, they're getting ready by dropping several hundred million on the visionary company that stayed ready for it. Smart move.

Our local Wisconsin university, UW-EC, received an entire computer lab full of SGI workstations in the 90's when SGI was big. I even had a friend who worked at SGI in Chippewa Falls, WI. I recall lots of folks fleeing to Cray (same city) over the years. It's sad to see SGI falling apart like this, but hopefully HP is a good home.

Silicon Graphics was bought by Rackable for pennies back in 2009, Rackable then changed its name to SGI. The SGI of old is long gone.

Not entirely. The SGI rep who serves NASA Goddard is still the same guy, after who knows how long.

We have an SGI UV300 system, which has a single kernel image running on 96 cores with 6TB of RAM. Not many people build systems like that these days. The newest expansion of the Goddard supercomputer uses SGI servers. I wish them well as part of HPE.

I loved the old SGI stuff. I remember back in the Netscape days (the buildings on Middlefield & Ellis) we had a whole bunch of Indys, Indigo 2s, o2s, Onyx boxes...all kinds of stuff. Loved the design, always had fun with IRIX, and of course, the Netscape browser.

Seeing that HP is buying up what's left does make me a little sad, but it's not a bad trip down memory lane. The Silicon Valley was fun for me back then.

I had no idea SGI was still around. Does anyone know if IRIX is still around in some capacity as well then?

It is not, the last point release update (6.5.30) came out 10 years ago. They may still have active support contracts for some IRIX systems, but it's very much history at this point.

It would be cool if they could release it as open source. There were aspects of IRIX that I really liked.

I am imaging security wasn't one of them ;)

Could you give some examples? Perhaps it could inspire people to enhance current OSes.

Through most of grad school, I had two SGIs on my desk (well one was under). Both were SGI Octane's, still my favorite machine of all time. But it was pretty clear by the time I got done that SGI was falling behind, and they should NEVER have shipped a WindowsNT workstation.

I used to love using SGI Feality Engines. Both Disney and Nintendo provided me with top end REs when I did projects for them. Amazing hardware and the software was also very good.

I'd like to see a new PC with the SGI name on it, or maybe a laptop. And a 4k successor to the 1600SW LCD display.

... I'd settle for a mousepad, though. Or maybe a mug.

Apple has competently filled in SGI's spot in the workstation market: the Mac Pro is a $5000 computer with outdated 3-year-old components and a very stylish case.

But it runs OSX, which is the reason some people are willing to pay that much for that configuration.

Those who need something with newer components and at a lower price can easily source a different machine and operating system.

Imagine if it ran IRIX...

That's pretty much the only reason anyone bought an SGI workstation over most of the company's first incarnation as well. For some reason they were forced into using Irix, so they had to buy one.

That's not my understanding at all! SGI had state of the art graphics (and other A/V hardware) at the beginning. At the end of the workstation market, commodity hardware got to the "good enough" level for a lot of people. A number of SGI engineers went to Nvidia.

At the end of SGI's first life, PC hardware was running rings around Irix workstations. The O2 was basically the slowest machine you could buy at the time. Where I was working at the time we switched our PRO/Engineer machines from SGI to whitebox PCs as soon as PTC ported to Windows NT. A dual-CPU Pentium Pro with Fire GL Pro absolutely smoked the O2 and Indy machines it replaced. So that was my experience, a shop that bought SGIs as long as they were the best platform for a particular software package, and threw them out at the earliest opportunity.

"Apple has competently filled in SGI's spot in the workstation market: the Mac Pro is a $5000 computer with outdated 3-year-old components and a very stylish case."

But can you add a Nintendo 64 right onto the system bus ?[1]

Literally a full Ultra 64, in the form of an add-in card, with its own Nintendo video out plug and N64 controller connectors.

[1] http://assemblergames.com/l/threads/my-complete-sgi-ultra64-...

Just $5k! No no no.

Does HP now represent about every company that was going to use Itanium? DEC, Compaq, SGI

That moment of confusion when something you thought was long dead turns out still exists.

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