Re:Hewlett Packard Enterprise to buy SGI
by nickpsecurity on Friday August 12, 2016 @04:52PM
(#12278715)
SGI was the company that knew we needed machines that could do 16cores & tens of GB of RAM in one desktop/server all the way up to 2,048 threads w/ 3+TB RAM in single image with tools handling workload. Their engineers knew it but we didn't. Their management applied their creations in many of the wrong ways. They missed the key market for that kind of desktop hardware.
Web apps. What SGI was doing every day on "high-end" boxes is pretty-much the minimum specs you need to run these modern web pages and applications with responsiveness that matches my Windows 98 on Pentium 2 experience. We have the IRC app with 100MB of RAM. Apps with 50+ dependencies w/ cut & pasted code + lots of temp files that RAMdrives might speed up. Even more if I get into containers and such where at one point people told me I needed a VM for each version of each app, library, or kernel plus one to debug the hypervisor itself. Plus updates while system was running. All that might eat up 16 cores and 64GB of RAM pretty fast. So, SGI's forward-thinking engineers got busy on the monsters packing 6TB and such. And "visual workstations" + FPGA's to accelerate the JavaScript engines for games, CAD, and Adobe Photoshop.
Such forward-thinking architecture. I mean, they're possibly the only ones that got it right. Only HP's gifted management sees this. They know more browsers, JS engines, clouds, and Nintendo games are coming out. So, they're getting ready by dropping several hundred million on the visionary company that stayed ready for it. Smart move.
Web apps. What SGI was doing every day on "high-end" boxes is pretty-much the minimum specs you need to run these modern web pages and applications with responsiveness that matches my Windows 98 on Pentium 2 experience. We have the IRC app with 100MB of RAM. Apps with 50+ dependencies w/ cut & pasted code + lots of temp files that RAMdrives might speed up. Even more if I get into containers and such where at one point people told me I needed a VM for each version of each app, library, or kernel plus one to debug the hypervisor itself. Plus updates while system was running. All that might eat up 16 cores and 64GB of RAM pretty fast. So, SGI's forward-thinking engineers got busy on the monsters packing 6TB and such. And "visual workstations" + FPGA's to accelerate the JavaScript engines for games, CAD, and Adobe Photoshop.
Such forward-thinking architecture. I mean, they're possibly the only ones that got it right. Only HP's gifted management sees this. They know more browsers, JS engines, clouds, and Nintendo games are coming out. So, they're getting ready by dropping several hundred million on the visionary company that stayed ready for it. Smart move.