The Wall Street Journal has a short piece about a new move from Silicon Graphics into providing software solutions to graphics manipulation problems.

Apparently SGI are going to be launching a toolset called Vue that allows users to remotely manipulate and share images and data, bypassing the need for specialist desktop machines. Sounds like a natural progression for a company that can boast the largest Single System Image (SSI) machines on the planet – thin clients and shove the data processing back into the data centre.

Anyone thinking this sounds a bit like ‘Cloud Computing’ or even ‘Sofware As A Service (SAAS)’ would be right on the money.

You can find a more detailed article at http://www.itexaminer.com/silicon-graphics-moves-into-software-market.aspx

I suppose I should be resigned to the whole benchmark silliness, where vendors highly tune their own systems and then run favourable benchmark tools – that have no real-world relevance – and compare the results against dissimilar and un-tuned gear from their rivals.

It’s the biggest ego match in the industry, and it’s all pretty sad. Are people really naive enough to buy kit based on these benchmarks, instead of trying out different vendors’ solutions in-house using their own real world workloads?

Regardless, I find the latest press release from Sun touting their ‘HPC leadership’ a bit much.

In it, Sun cites SGI beating FLUENT benchmarks. Yet, the press release doesn’t mention numbers at all. The link to the actual FLUENT benchmarks shows no values at all for the X2250 cluster Sun used, and the main Sun benchmarks website makes no mention of these ‘HPC dominating’ benchmark figures either. Surely if you’re going to trumpet the results, then you should also be making the actual figures available?

bmseer (a blogger from Sun who I have a huge respect for, and who regularly picks apart the outrageous benchmark figures from IBM) should be hanging his head in shame right about now ;-)

Regardless, the Sun benchmark site is well worth a visit at http://www.sun.com/benchmarks/

Silicon Graphics could take a leaf out of Sun’s book here and be far more pro-active and upfront with their current systems’ performance figures.

Meanwhile I live in hope for the day when we have a benchmark that measures the enormity of a vendor’s lies in their press releases. Like the Top 500, I’m sure IBM would be way out in front.

An interesting article has popped up on The Register by Timothy Morgan, where he argues that the tech stock slide produced by the ongoing credit crisis has provided a perfect time for large, established – and exposed – technology companies to take themselves private.

The usual R&D heavy suspects are discussed – Sun, Cray – and Silicon Graphics.

Silicon Graphics, once a high-flying Unix workstation and supercomputer maker, should also think about going private. The company’s shares trade on the small cap portion of the NASDAQ exchange, and it has a market capitalization of $101m as we go to press. In the first six months of 2008, SGI posted sales of $172.9m but booked losses of $74.9m. The company had just under $40m in cash as the June quarter closed.

It could be possible, especially with continued strong government contracts and continued interest from large investors.

What do you think?

Onyx2 Family Periodic Table

February, 1997

Configurations:

(A) 32MB/1GB/17"

(B) 64MB/2GB/17"/SoftWindows

(C) 64MB/4GB/17"/SoftWindows

(D) 64MB/4GB/17"/SoftWindows/O2 Video

One (1) copy of IRIX is sold with each configuration
above specifically configured for the # of CPUs included.

Onyx2 Product Family Upgrades/Add-ons

2xR10K node, 1MB cache, 64MB (w/Reality only)

2xR10K node, 4MB cache, 64MB (w/IR only)

Compute insert module,2xR10K, 4MB cache, 64MB

Expansion Rack, 2x10K, 4MB cache, 64MB

Add’l 64MB memory

Add’l 128MB memory

Upgrade 4.5GB to 9.1GB SCSI sys disk

Add’l 16MB Tex Mem RM for Reality

Add’l 64MB Tex Mem RM for Reality

Add’l 16MB Tex Mem RM for InfiniteReality

Add’l 64MB Tex Mem RM for InfiniteReality

Add’l InfiniteReality pipe, 16MB Tex Mem, 2 Chnl

Add’l InfiniteReality pipe, 64MB Tex Mem, 2 Chnl

Add’l InfiniteReality pipe, 16MB Tex Mem, 8 Chnl

Add’l InfiniteReality pipe, 64MB Tex Mem, 8 Chnl

Graphics insert module, IR, 16MB Tex Mem, 2 Chnl

Graphics insert module, IR, 64MB Tex Mem, 2 Chnl

Graphics insert module, IR 16MB Tex Mem, 8 Chnl

Graphics insert module, IR, 64MB Tex Mem, 8 Chnl

Expansion Rack, IR, 16MB Tex Mem, 2 Chnl

Expansion Rack, IR, 64MB Tex Mem, 2 Chnl

Expansion Rack, IR, 16MB Tex Mem, 8 Chnl

Expansion Rack, IR, 64MB Tex Mem, 8 Chnl

As software developers the world over prepare to mark the 25th anniversary of the GNU System, Silicon Graphics, Inc. (Nasdaq: SGIC) today announced it is releasing a new version of the SGI Free Software License B. The license, which now mirrors the free X11 license used by X.Org, further opens previously released SGI(R) graphics software that has set the industry standard for visualization software and has proven essential to GNU/Linux(R) and a host of applications.

Today’s announcement affects software created by SGI that forms the building blocks of many elements of today’s gaming, visual computing, and immersive experiential technologies, including a wide range of proven visualization solutions provided by SGI.

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