Silicon Graphics

Silicon Cartoon Computer Systems or SGCS) was a architect of high-performance accretion solutions, including computer accouterments and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark. Its antecedent bazaar was 3D cartoon affectation terminals, but its products, strategies and bazaar positions acquired decidedly over time.

Initial systems were based on the Geometry Engine that Clark and Marc Hannah had developed at Stanford University, and were acquired from Clark's broader accomplishments in computer graphics. The Geometry Engine was the aboriginal very-large-scale affiliation (VLSI) accomplishing of a geometry pipeline, specialized accouterments that accelerated the "inner-loop" geometric computations bare to affectation three-dimensional images.

SGI was headquartered in Sunnyvale, California; it was originally congenital as a California association in November 1981, and reincorporated as a Delaware association in January 1990. On April 1, 2009, SGI filed for Chapter 11 defalcation aegis and appear that it would advertise essentially all of its assets to Rackable Systems, a accord accomplished on May 11, 2009, with Rackable bold the name "Silicon Cartoon International

ACE Consortium

SGI was allotment of the Advanced Computing Environment initiative, formed in the aboriginal 1990s with 20 added companies, including Compaq, Digital Equipment Corporation, MIPS Computer Systems, Groupe Bull, Siemens, NEC, NeTpower, Microsoft and Santa Cruz Operation. Its absorbed was to acquaint workstations based on the MIPS architectonics and able to run Windows NT and SCO UNIX. The accumulation produced the Advanced RISC Computing (ARC) specification, but began to break little added than a year afterwards its formation.

Final bankruptcy and acquisition by Rackable Systems

In December 2008, SGI accustomed a delisting notification from NASDAQ, as its bazaar amount had been beneath the minimum $35 actor claim for 10 after trading days, and additionally did not accommodated NASDAQ's another requirements of a minimum stockholders' disinterestedness of $2.5 actor or anniversary net assets from continuing operations of $500,000 or more.[25]

On April 1, 2009, SGI filed for Chapter 11 again, and appear that it would advertise essentially all of its assets to Rackable Systems for $25 million.[26] The sale, ultimately for $42.5 million, was accomplished on May 11, 2009; at the aforementioned time, Rackable appear their acceptance of "Silicon Graphics International" as their all-around name and brand.[27][28] The Bankruptcy cloister appointed continuing affairs and hearings for June 3 and 24, 2009, and July 22, 2009.[29][30][dated info]

After the Rackable acquisition, Vizworld annual appear a alternation of six accessories that account the atrophy of SGI.

High-end server market

SGI affiliated to enhance its band of servers (including some supercomputers) based on the SN architecture. SN, for Scalable Node, is a technology developed by SGI in the mid-1990s that uses cache-coherent non-uniform anamnesis admission (cc-NUMA). In an SN system, processors, memory, and a bus- and memory-controller are accompanying calm into an article alleged a node, usually on a distinct ambit board. Nodes are affiliated by a accelerated interconnect alleged NUMAlink (originally branded CrayLink). There is no centralized bus, and instead admission amid processors, memory, and I/O accessories is done through a switched bolt of links and routers.

Thanks to the accumulation adherence of the broadcast aggregate memory, SN systems calibration forth several axes at once: as CPU calculation increases, so does anamnesis capacity, I/O capacity, and arrangement analysis bandwidth. This allows the accumulated anamnesis of all the nodes to be accessed beneath a distinct OS angel application accepted shared-memory synchronization methods. This makes an SN arrangement far easier to affairs and able to accomplish college sustained-to-peak achievement than non-cache-coherent systems like accepted clusters or massively alongside computers which crave applications cipher to be accounting (or re-written) to do absolute message-passing advice amid their nodes.

The aboriginal SN system, accepted as SN-0, was appear in 1996 beneath the artefact name Origin 2000. Based on the MIPS R10000 processor, it scaled from 2 to 128 processors and a abate version, the Origin 200 (SN-00), scaled from 1 to 4. After enhancements enabled systems of as ample as 512 processors.

The additional bearing system, originally alleged SN-1 but after SN-MIPS, was appear in July 2000, as the Origin 3000. It scaled from 4 to 512 processors, and 1,024-processor configurations were delivered by appropriate adjustment to some customers. A smaller, beneath scalable accomplishing followed, alleged Origin 300.

In November 2002, SGI appear a repackaging of its SN system, beneath the name Origin 3900. It quadrupled the processor breadth body of the SN-MIPS system, from 32 up to 128 processors per arbor while affective to a "fat tree" interconnect topology.

In January 2003, SGI appear a alternative of the SN belvedere alleged the Altix 3000 (internally alleged SN-IA). It acclimated Intel Itanium 2 processors and ran the Linux operating arrangement kernel. At the time it was released, it was the world's best scalable Linux-based computer, acknowledging up to 64 processors in a distinct arrangement node.32 Nodes could be affiliated application the aforementioned NUMAlink technology to anatomy what SGI predictably termed "superclusters".

In February 2004, SGI appear accepted abutment for 128 processor nodes to be followed by 256 and 512 processor versions that year.

In April 2004, SGI appear the auction of its Aliascomputer application business for about $57 million.33

In October 2004, SGI congenital the supercomputer Columbia, which bankrupt the apple almanac for computer speed, for the NASA Ames Research Center. It was a array of 20 Altix supercomputers anniversary with 512 Intel Itanium 2 processors active Linux, and accomplished abiding acceleration of 42.7 abundance floating-point operations per additional (teraflops), calmly topping Japan's acclaimed Earth Simulator's almanac of 35.86 teraflops. (A anniversary later, IBM's upgraded Blue Gene/L clocked in at 70.7 teraflops).

In July 2006, SGI appear an SGI Altix 4700 arrangement with 1,024 processors and 4 TB of anamnesis active a distinct Linux arrangement image.