Re:Hewlett Packard Enterprise to buy SGI
by mbreese on Friday August 12, 2016 @10:26AM
(#12275895)
Those were likely former Rackable Systems clusters, which bought and renamed itself SGI. Sadly, I think that all that's left of the old SGI is the name. Even the HPC magic they had I believe originally came from Cray -- another name from a bygone era.
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Cray still builds fairly impressive single-image Limux machines. Not as pretty as their forerunners, but impressive on their own.
You're right... I was thinking back to 2000's SGI. It's hard to track of when / where these companies are. SGI buys Cray, SGI spins Cray out to Tera, Rackable buys SGI, HP splits, HPE buys SGI...
It's all crazy.
But yes, Cray still has some impressive gear independently.
Re:Hewlett Packard Enterprise to buy SGI
by pinewurst on Saturday August 13, 2016 @02:48AM
(#12280550)
They are for sure not single image machines. Each node is running its own kernel, sees only its own resources and is scheduled by the system-wide batch scheduler node. Running across nodes requires MPI to tie things together (tenuously) at the application level.
If they are impressive, it's only because of physical size and aggregate resources available, not because there's the least bit of magic involved. It's the usual Intel+-NVidia CPUs/chipsets/etc. At the current time, it's mostly their legacy proprietary interconnect.