Stories about: Silicon Graphics

IBM's supercomputers continue to be the fastest in the world, according to the latest Top500 list of the speediest machines released Wednesday. The company snagged six of the top 10 spots, including the coveted number one and two placings while widening the performance gap between its machines and those of its competitors.

While the loudest buzz in the operating system/hardware arena has been the news of Apple's jump to Intel CPUs, another story that may be of more interest to enterprise datacenter managers involves two completely different operating system/CPU platforms - Linux and HP's NonStop servers.

In an apparent effort to sell massive number crunching facilities to mere companies, rather than national security agencies, nuclear labs and well-funded universities,IBM has created a smaller and less powerful version of its Blue Gene/L supercomputer.

Taking Linux and installing it on an alternative hardware platform may not be easy, but you can learn a lot from the experience.

Silicon Graphics (SGI) on Monday plans to unveil a new product line designed to make it easier for users with medium-sized computing needs to set up clusters of the Mountain View, California, company's Altix 350 servers.

Accommodating large patch sets in Linux is expected to mean splitting the 2.7 version of the platform to accommodate these changes, according to Andrew Morton, lead maintainer of the Linux kernel for Open Source Development Labs (OSDL).

When the Top500 list of the world's most powerful computers was published on Monday, the 10,240 processor "Columbia" supercomputer that Silicon Graphics (SGI) recently built for NASA's (National Aeronautics and Space Administration's) Ames Research Center was the number-two system on the list. Columbia is a much-needed success for SGI, which has been struggling to reclaim customers lost during an ill-fated foray into the Windows market during the late 1990s. Since taking the reins of the company in 1999, Bob Bishop, an 18-year SGI veteran, has refocused SGI on its core technical markets, and bet the company's future on the three core technologies in its Altix line of servers: the Linux operating system, Intel's Itanium processor architecture, and SGI's own NUMAflex system design. With NUMAflex, SGI has been able to scale Linux to unprecedented levels.

With performance almost double that of the Earth Simulator, in Yokohama, Japan, IBM's Blue Gene/L on Monday was officially ranked first on the Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers. IBM built four of the top ten machines on the biannual list, which was set to be announced Monday evening at the SC2004 conference in Pittsburgh.

As more companies explore the possibility of adding supercomputers to their IT stables, prices of the machines continue to fall even as their computing power and flexibility for business use is growing.

IBM and Silicon Graphics (SGI) have won contracts to supply Linux-based supercomputers to a Korean national university and a Japanese nuclear research institute, the two companies said Thursday.

Silicon Graphics has unveiled a new version of its Altix 3700 high-performance computer with a design that doubles the number of Itanium 2 processors that can fit into a single server.