Written by Silicon Graphics have an enviable reputation as an R&D powerhouse, creating powerful graphics workstations that provided the effects for many Hollywood movies. Less well known are the monster servers and supercomputers that Silicon Graphics create.
When Silicon Graphics bought legendary supercomputer company Cray in the mid 1990s, they cherry picked some of Cray’s expertise, and built their own line of powerful super machines. The Origin 2000 was the first of these. Powered by MIPS CPUs, the Origin 2000 could scale from 8 CPUs up to 1024. Adding special graphics cabinets created the Onyx, a graphics supercomputer of immense power.
Then SGI created the Origin 3000, expanding on the original design. The Origin 3000 used modular ‘bricks’ – containing processors, IO cards, or even graphics cards – to provide very customised configurations. Again, ranging from 8 CPUs to 1024 – with rumours of extreme 2048 CPU machines being built for government labs.
These machines were Single System Image (SSI) machines. Despite the large number of processors in them, they ran one copy of the IRIX operating system, and behaved to the end user exactly the same way as a desktop compuyter would.
Silicon Graphics are continuing their development with the current line of Altix scaleable supercomputers, based around Intel’s Itanium CPU and running Linux. With multi-core Itaniums available rumours abound of giant 4096 core SSI systems secreted away in government agencies.
