VizWorld.com

InsideHPC brings us the shocking news that SGI, the oldest of graphics companies that hasn’t done any graphics lately, is returning to its roots a bit and announcing their “new” VUE suite of products.  I put “new” in quotes because I distinctly remember the VUE products from abou 5 years ago.  But insightful John Leidel noticed that perhaps this announcement went a bit deeper:

I spent about then minutes flying through presenations from their VP of viz, Bob Pette, when I noticed something interesting.  The logo was no longer the singular sgi cube [affectionately called the "Bug Logo"], but rather it actually contained “Silicon Graphics.”  Plot thickens.  Is SGI going back to its roots, not only in graphics, but in corporate logo as well?

I’ve not seem much success in the VUE line in the past, as it seemed more gimmicky than functional.  However, maybe this new version will change that. Their SoftVUE, PowerVUE, RemoteVUE trio seems to be a stab at systems like HP’s Scalable Visualization, which I looked at several years ago and passed on.  The other tools are, from what I remember, primarily hardware accelerated live-video viewing tools, so they’re honest in saying you can view data from any source, because you’re getting those sources as video streams live in your view, and then you can overlay, stretch, and warp them around.  It’s a neat way to merge disparate systems like Google Maps and live video streams, or CAD and Simulation outputs, but there’s no cross-talk between the applications.

Hopefully this new release not only signals some new features to these tools, but a newfound thrust without SGI towards reinstating the “G” in their name

via Silicon Graphics Releases VUE Viz Platform | insideHPC.com.

Hardware sgi, vue

SGI stocks plunged this morning based on the results of yesterday’s analyst meeting.

SGI, which is based in Fremont, Calif., lost $2.3 million, or 7 cents per share, in its fiscal second quarter, which spans October through December. If not for certain accounting items, the company said it would have earned 4 cents per share, Even on that basis, the results were far below the average earnings estimate of 25 cents per share among analysts polled by FactSet.

I’ve had a chance to glance over the transcript of the call, and it’s a bit odd.  Analysts are a bit peeved that after Barrenechea left they were assured they would maintain their financial guidance, and then again shortly thereafter.  Then they drop the bombshell of their failing European division, along with other “certain accounting items”.  Unfortunately, no one from SGI was really able (or willing?) to elaborate on what that meant.

With SGI currently under leadership of an interim CEO and now dropping 25% of their stock price, and planning for a reorganization of their European division and probably some product realignments, could SGI be about to change hands again?

via SGI shares plunge 23 pct as profit margins fall – CBS News.

Hardware sgi

In what could be construed as baby steps back to their old Graphics roots, SGI is offering some OpenGL training to students in 2012.  It’s a 4.5 day classroom environment that’s supposed to take you from nothing to OpenGL, GLSL, and rendering sufficiency.

Students learn to view and model in 3D, and to create animated, wire frame and solid geometery, under interactive control from input devices. Students add lighting, textures, and other effects to increase realism. New OpenGL 3.0 topics include using vertex buffer objects for better performance and an introduction to the programmable shaders and GLSL for advanced shading techniques using vertex shaders and fragment shaders. This course discusses both the fixed and function pipeline and an introduction to the newer programmable shader pipeline with OpenGL.

While I hope it’s the beginning of a return to graphics, I doubt it.  More likely it’s just SGI sponsoring the class in exchange for some advertising and community involvement.

via HPC Training – OpenGL Programming.

Science education, opengl, sgi

An article in the Times of India talks about the growth of SGI, the doubly-failed supercomputing company, in the wake of certain flubs by HP and IBM.  Before I begin the dissection, I think these paragraphs are worth reading closely:

“Ninety days back, Leo announced HP’s new future to be in mobility, cloud and connectivity . Ninety days later, he withdraws mobility and connectivity, recalling its TouchPad and a planned spinoff of its PC business.” HP’s uncertainty is turning out to be good for Barrenechea’s USbased supercomputing company which recently posted better than expected results even in an uncertain economic environment.

…

“IBM just walked away from a customer at the University of Illinois, a $200-million dollar project. I don’t know how you will build a trusted relationship with a customer when you are willing to stand up to an important system and say just kidding,” added Barrenechea , who was the CTO of CA Inc before joining the SGI board in 2006.

Got to give them credit, I think HP’s uncertainty will be a boon for many companies, not just SGI.  However, I don’t see how HP pulling out of tablet computing is really going to do much for SGI’s HPC business.

As for the 2nd one, I had to stop myself from laughing out loud.  Talking smack about IBM and Blue Waters after they busted the $30M PSC deal (More here and here) really shows how short their own memory is.  Of course now NCSA is looking for another system to fill their floor, but they’ve first got to secure funding and such so it’s probably a good year away.  The Blue Waters system was an NSF system (targeted for DARPA research) but I bet DARPA won’t be paying for another system hosted at NCSA anytime soon, so that leaves NSF or other agencies to pickup the tab.  With NSF focusing on heavy petascale+ systems, they tend to be offering bigger awards less frequently.

Of course, none of anything mentioned here has anything to do with Graphics.  SGI really needs to find a new meaning for that G.

Update 12:43pm – Clarified that Blue Waters was funded by NSF, but targeted for DARPA research.

via Times of India and HPCwire

Hardware hpc, sgi

Two big announcements from the old mainstay of graphics came out this week.  SGI announced their latest quarterly earnings, showing a nice growth in revenue, but also a surprising amount of expenses for a company locked in R&D spending.

For the full fiscal 2011 year, SGI’s revenues came to $629.6m, up 56 per cent, and the company shrank its net loss to $21.2m, which worked out to a loss of 69 cents per share. By comparison, in fiscal 2010, SGI had lost $88.9m, or $2.92 per share.

But that’s not all:  In a surprising move to the CFD community, SGI helped themselves to a nice handful of popular open-source CFD simulation package OpenCFD.  OpenCFD has been around for 1970, actively developed and the latest version OpenFoam 2.0.1 just came out a few weeks ago.  Now SGI owns it and plans to better integrate it into their own software stack:

CFD is a big sales driver for SGI, and the idea that CEO Mark Barrenechea has for OpenFoam is not all that different from the idea that his old boss, Larry Ellison, had when Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems in January 2010. Barrenechea said that SGI would provide “the market’s first fully integrated CFD solution, where all the hardware and software work together”. That sure sounds like an Oracle “hardware-software-complete” sales pitch.

While much of SGI’s business recently has been pretty new territory, this move is classic SGI.  SGI has a long history of “integrating” Software stacks into their own products, from old Irix and SGIMPI libraries to special load balancing and performance analysis packages.  Added a simulation package to the mix is just the next logical step, and could prove a huge boon to their bottom line.

Let’s just hope it doesn’t turn out like Alias, Cray, or Intergraph..

via SGI (almost) doubles sales, (almost) halves losses • The Register.

Science cfd, sgi

I’ve got to admit, I’m impressed by SGI.  I really thought the UV system was going to be the albatross that drug SGI to Davy Jones’ locker, but they’re actually doing ok.  A press-release out today announces 500 Altix UV systems delivered.  Now, most companies wouldn’t even bother announcing 500 systems (Dell probably ships 500 systems in a day or less), but these are significantly bigger and more expensive that your average computer.

As the world’s most scalable x86 platform, customers can deploy standard Windows Server® 2008 R2 and Windows-based applications to the maximum scale possible of 256 physical cores and 2 terabytes of memory. Altix UV 1000 with 256 cores of Intel® Xeon® processor 7500 series and 2 TB of memory has four times the x86 scalability of HP and 2.6 times the scalability of IBM.

Their partnership with Microsoft for Windows HPC Server is probably a big reason they’ve done as well as they have, as Windows HPC Server really seems to be taking off in Financial HPC.   I’m not aware of anyone doing petascale work with UV’s, but maybe they’re on to something in the high-but-not-extreme end of HPC.

Of course, their financials still seem a little fishy to me.  We’ll see how they look at the end of the year.

via SGI Marks Supercomputing Milestone with over 500 Altix UV Systems Delivered | Business Wire.

Hardware hpc, sgi, ultraviolet, uv

Now here’s something I didn’t expect.  SGI is preparing an OpenGL Training Course over in California where students get a nice 5-day course on OpenGL, GLEW, and GLSL.

Students learn to view and model in 3D, and to create animated, wire frame and solid geometery, under interactive control from input devices. Students add lighting, textures, and other effects to increase realism. New OpenGL 3.0 topics include using vertex buffer objects for better performance and an introduction to the programmable shaders and GLSL for advanced shading techniques using vertex shaders and fragment shaders. This course discusses both the fixed and function pipeline and an introduction to the newer programmable shader pipeline with OpenGL.

I find it ironic and humorous that the company that was sadly always one step behind is now offering a “cutting edge training class” on OpenGL3, rather than the current OpenGL4.  Nonetheless, looks like a great course covering a wide variety of topics.

via HPC Training – OpenGL Programming.

Science education, opengl, sgi

An SEC filing from today has announced what may be the next dark chapter in the legacy of SGI: Layoffs expected to run the company $6.6million in severance packages.

On February 22, 2011, Silicon Graphics International Corp. (the “Company”) began providing notices to employees whose employment will be terminated as part of a worldwide workforce reduction. The Company implemented a restructuring to streamline operations and reduce operating expenses. The workforce reduction was approved by the Company’s Board of Directors on February 18, 2011.

In connection with the worldwide workforce reduction, the Company expects to incur pre-tax cash charges of up to $6.6 million for severance pay expenses and related cash expenditures. The Company expects to recognize the majority of the severance charges in the third and fourth quarter of fiscal 2011, with the remaining costs to be recognized in the first quarter of fiscal 2012.

They claim it’s just to trim the fat and make them more efficient, but let’s look at some numbers.

If you assume a fully burdened cost of an employee to be roughly $150k (that includes benefits, salary, everything), then a 90-day severance could be somewhere in the neighborhood of $50 ($150k / 4 = $37.5k, then add a bit for padding and insurance).  At $6.6Million, that’s over 130 employees.

Looking back at their final quarterly filing for 2010, you can get some rough numbers on their employees (Search for ‘headcount’):

• Manufacturing: 581 people
• R&D: 278
• Sales & Marketing: 247
• Administrative: 193
• Total: Around 1300

That means they just axed 10% of the company.  That’s more than a little trimming, that’s pretty substantial reorganization.

I’ve heard a lot of skepticism over SGI’s recent amazing quarterly report, given the displeasure I’ve heard from several individuals over the results of the UltraViolet product line.  I’m starting to think that, even with the great PR they got from that report, it was largely smoke and mirrors over the change in accounting and rushing a few major sales just under the wire at the end of the year.  I’ll be surprised if they can do it again this year.

Update 12/24 1pm: The Register got their hands on an internal memo about this, they claims only 55 employees were laid off in the reduction, totalling about 4%.

“Our actions today reflect a variety of considerations for performance and efficiency within the context of achieving our overall FY11 financial goals,” Barrenechea explained in his email to employees. “Any reduction in force, no matter the number of positions impacted, is difficult. We achieved a strong first half to our fiscal year and we need to be prudent with our costs in the second half. Today’s announcement does not change our outlook for growth and profitability, but rather, reinforces our commitment to achieving these goals with streamlined operations and optimized operating expenses.”

via WebFilings | EDGAR view.

Hardware feature, sgi

DARPA’s “Exascale Challenge” asks vendors to design a supercomputer than can cram a petaflop of power into a single rack.  Several vendors have begun on the effort, and SGI’s entry was codenamed ‘Project Mojo’.  Folks at The Register got some details on the system, and… Well, first read the brief description:

As it turns out, the stick of the Project Mojo system is a computing element that is nearly as long as the rack is deep – three feet – with the width and a little more than the height of a double-wide PCI-Express peripheral card. Mannel wouldn’t say what processor is implemented on the stick, but it is possible that SGI has variants with both Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron processors. Considering that Project Mojo is an experimental system with limited sales on the front end, it is reasonable to conjecture that SGI will start with Xeons and expand into Opterons if there is customer demand.

So an element is 3-feet deep, and roughly the size of a double-wide PCIe card, and (if you read a bit further) you can cram 80 of them into a full-size rack.

This sounds mighty familiar.  In fact, over at my “other job”, I have one of the BOXX “RenderFarm on Wheels” systems containing their renderBOXX module.  The renderBOXX module is 32-inches deep (4 inches shy of 3 feet), 7 inches tall and  under 4 inches wide, but each module actually contains 2 nodes.  In a full-size rack, you can pack in 80 nodes.

So basically, it sounds like SGI is taking BOXX’s RenderBOXX system and splitting the nodes in half, and found a way to pack in a passively-cooled GPU.  Nothing too earth shattering there.

I hope they have some bigger plans coming down the pipe.

via SGI readies first Project Mojo supers • The Register.

Hardware hpc, sgi

The not-so-secret HPC that’s going to bring SGI back to superiority as the premium SSI HPC provider has finally been announced: Ultraviolet.

UV features the fifth generation of the NUMAlink interconnect, offering a 15 GB/sec transfer rate, MPI offload capability in the UV hub chip, and direct access up to 16 TB of shared memory. The system can be configured with up to 2048 Nehalem-EX cores shipping Q2 next year from Intel in a single system image, and as with the 4700 multiple SSIs can be federated together while preserving the single global address space. When I was being briefed on the launch before the show, Jill Matzke, Altix product manager, reminded me that SGI has been very active in the Linux community: all the IP needed to make this shared-memory goodness work has been contributed back to the SUSE and Red Hat communities, so you can actually load a stock distro on your UV when it shows up, and everything will work.

Price and availability are still a bit fuzzy, as SGI is waiting for Intel to announce the new Nehalem chips that it uses, but it’s great to see SGI rising back to HPC powerhouse status.  I’ll be meeting with SGI tomorrow afternoon and hope to get more details then.

via SGI finally announces make-or-break HPC platform | insideHPC.com.

Hardware hpc, sc09, sgi, ultraviolet