SC09 kicks off next week in the US, and SGI has been dropping hints about a big product announcement coming up.

There’ll be the usual pimping of the latest lines from their product range:

Octane™ III, SGI’s personal supercomputer, ICE Cube™ modular data center, CloudRack™ scalable workgroup clusters, SGI® Altix® ICE departmental server, and SGI® InfiniteStorage hardware and software products.

I’m hoping the new shiny bit of kit is going to be a line of Xeon based Altix gear, but we shall see:

“Supercomputing 2009 is the preeminent conference for leading HPC companies to showcase their most innovative technologies,” said Mark J. Barrenechea, president and CEO of SGI. “SGI is proud to demonstrate influential HPC products that scale from the personal supercomputer to the largest scale-up platform, and to make a major product announcement.”

New toys aside, SGI’s CTO Dr. Eng Lim Goh is going to be giving a number of talks, which are always worth a listen. He’ll be presenting “Scalable Architecture for the Many-Core and Exascale Era” at the Exhibitor Speaker Forum on Tuesday, November 17, at 2:30 p.m. PST in room E143-144. He’ll also be talking about scaling up systems using the Nehalem EX in the Intel Theater within the Intel on Wednesday, November 18, at 4:00 p.m. PST.

Once again this year work has gotten in the way and I won’t be able to attend, but I highly recommend you keep on top of things with John’s coverage of SC09 over at insideHPC.