SGI is Back

I missed this a few months ago. Silicon Graphics, that great company that gave us the hardware that generated visuals for movies like Jurassic Park, is trading on NASDAQ again (as of May, 2009). I just saw this on the cool site SiliconBunny.com. They are also the original creators of the OpenGL standard, a cross-platform graphics API which pre-dates and competes with Microsoft's DirectX.

Rackable Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:RACK - News) announced today the completion of its legal name change to “Silicon Graphics International Corp.” The company also announced today that it will change its NASDAQ stock ticker symbol from “RACK” to “SGI.” The stock ticker change has gone into effect for the trading community on Monday, May 18, 2009.

And in September they released a new workstation, the Octane III, advertised to usher in "... a new era of personal innovation in strategic science, research, development and visualization." Whether the hype is true or not, it's nice to see the company trying to make a comeback.

Back in my days as a Unix Admin in the late 90's, I worked on Unix workstations from Sun (both BSD-based SunOS and the newer System V based Solaris), SGI (Silicon Graphics, running their IRIX OS), NeXT (Stephen Job's company after he left Apple that later got bought by Apple and whose technology melded into MacOSX), HP (HP-UX was the first Unix I ever used back in college), and AT&T (I had the "pleasure" of working on an AT&T 3B2). I can definitely say back then SGI was the coolest computer company around. Unix techies and scientists were well aware of SGI, but they only briefly managed to get much notice from the general populace due to their computers being featured in Jurassic Park.

They had everything from personal Unix workstations designed for 3D graphics better than anything a standard PC could do at the time (this was back in the days when PC graphics cards were comparatively primitive) to "low end" super computers (they eventually bought out Cray, the original super computer company).

The new machine will not run IRIX. It will instead run "Red Hat or SUSE Linux (which SGI’s excellent ProPack enhancements) or Windows HPC Server 2008". SGI actually IRIX on MIPS processors in favor of Linux on Intel a few years ago, so this is not really a surprise. I wish I had the money to buy one, but these are definitely high end machines.

Oh, well. At least I can try fsv on my Linux boxes at home for that SGI/Jurassic Park nostalgia. If you're a Windows user, you might want to try StepTree.