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Special Edition Podcast: The Rise and Fall of SGI

April 2nd, 2009 Randall Hand

A special edition podcast all about SGI. We open with the history of SGI: the IRIS1000, the Itanium debacle, Cray & Alias|Wavefront, we cover it all. Then, we sit down with John West of InsideHPC to discuss the terms of the sale to Rackable today, to discover just what a Section 363 & Stalking Horse are. Finally, we have a phone-interview with Robert Petty, Vice President of Corporate Marketing at SGI to get some answers to a few difficult questions.

It’s a long episode, at 27minutes, but well worth it given the history of the once-great SGI.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .

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Brandon
Great summary and very useful. And good work with the quick turnaround and scoring the interview.
http://www.ancienttreearchive.org/ BerkeleyGuy
Randall,
Thank you for such a great summary. With a company like SGI which has such a rich history in the Valley it must have been difficult to decide what Not to include.
My 2 cents now….
As aggressive as SGI has tried to be in taking huge risks it’s sad to see how they seemingly folded and acquiesced to Nvidia on the 3D IP lawsuit. It would have been a different world in the Valley if SGI stuck it out in court with Nvidia. Alas, this is yet one more bad choice for SGI.
SGI has had too much bad stuff happen to them for yes some poor decisions/choices, but things do change and SGI has had enough bad luck! SGI’s Karma is clean, and the universe shall finally help them! Does that sound to “hippy dippy?” LOL, well too bad!
I am of the mind that SGI’s ip (which is very rich in the HPC and memory share space) will deliver good fortunes in the future.
Some key things to watch I believe new alliances with startups that SGI is creating in some disruptive technologies. One interesting relationship SGI working with SSD SAN’s and Virident.
Godspeed & Peace you mi Amigo and say hello to the next stray cat you see! Meow!
- BerkeleyGuy