SGI and IRIX Archive

Got $18m to spare? That's the market capitalization of one of Silicon Valley's most glamorous companies this morning, after Silicon Graphics Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The size of SGI's debt - at $664m it's twice the value of its assets - is enough to deter all but the most determined bargain hunter. Apart from a ragbag of trademarks - such as OpenGL - what growth has SGI left to offer?

Silicon Graphics Inc. has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The press release sugarcoats: "Silicon Graphics today announced that it has reached an agreement with all of its Senior Secured bank lenders and with holders of a significant amount of its Senior Secured debt on the terms of a reorganization plan that will reduce its debt by approximately $250 million, greatly simplifying its capital structure." El Reg, The Inq, and the WSJ have more.

SGI's new CEO has wasted no time performing a major shakeup at the server company. Moves announced today include substantial layoffs, executive departures and SGI's plans to tweak its server business. SGI will fire close to 12 per cent of its workforce - 250 staffers - in the hopes of saving some extra cash. Word of the layoffs arrives just about a month after SGI moved former CEO Bob Bishop aside and tapped Dennis McKenna as its new chief. SGI heralded the layoffs as proof of McKenna's quick, decisive action, issuing a statement titled 'CEO Delivers Aggressive Changes in First 30 Days as Part of Turnaround.' The Inq speculates about nVidia buying SGI's graphics dpt. Update: Couldn't resist.

SGI issued its most ominous regulatory filing to date, warning that a bad 2006 could force the former high-flyer into bankruptcy. In order to improve its business, SGI will consider measures ranging from axing or selling off product lines to pursuing 'a strategic partner or acquirer.' The hardware maker will basically look at anything and everything to remain a going concern.

Silicon Graphics will start showing off the Altix 4000 Monday, the second generation of the company's technical computing machines based on the Linux operating system and Itanium processors.

Monday was the first day since 1986 that the stock of Silicon Graphics Inc., better known as SGI, has not been traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Its recent delisting is just the latest chapter of a long, painful story that analysts say is loaded with lessons for other companies. However, company executives say SGI's customer base remains loyal and its technology base is strong enough to sustain it, albeit in narrow vertical markets.

SGI today claimed that it can bring supercomputing to the masses in the form of its cheapest ever scalable rack-mounted servers and storage systems.

Can a proprietary Unix be a desktop OS that competes with Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux desktops? Although it may lack the visual effects of OS X, and installation is tricky in parts, Irix is a stable desktop OS -- possibly because it runs only on SGI's own hardware. Read the rest at NewsForge.

The company is Silicon Graphics Incorporated, or SGI, which once was famous for its high-powered graphics and 3-D workstations but has fallen on hard times of late. SGI now focuses on supercomputers, but there's a tiny coterie of fans dedicated to keeping the company's aging but high-powered workstations alive. On a similar note, the every-three-months maintaince release of Irix is 3 months late.

Even as Silicon Graphics trumpeted on Tuesday a new speed record with the Columbia supercomputer it built for NASA, CNET News.com has learned, it quietly submitted another, faster result: 51.9 trillion calculations per second. SGI also plans to announce a new Linux computer Nov. 1, a machine that uses Intel's newest Itanium 2 processor and packs the chips twice as compactly as current machines do.

SGI recently announced plans for a new multi-paradigm architecture beyond the current ccNUMA that tries to combine scalar and vector architectures.

IRIX 6.5.24 has been released and is shipping with all new systems from SGI worldwide manufacturing centers. The IRIX 6.5.24 release continues the focus on stability, reliability, security and compatibility required in the IRIX 6.5.xx quarterly release process.

Recently, Ken Farmer of LinuxHPC.org and David Kanter of Real World Technologies had an opportunity to interview Jason Pettit, of SGI. Jason is the Product Line Manager for the SGI Altix 3000 at SGI, and has been working with various Linux based systems since 1998.

It wasn't that long ago that SGI completely owned the media production space, but with Macs making headway, SGI have instead added MacOSX to the list of supported O/S's with their clustered XFS filesystem. Now Macs can share the same filesystem as the IRIX, Linux and Windows boxes, and get fibre channel performance at the same time.