How Sun Microsystems And Sgi Got Into The Supercomputer Market
Sun and SGI both began as workstation manufacturers, designing some of the earliest UNIX workstations on the market. Over the years, both companies have migrated into the server market, and now not only produce some of the fastest servers available, but are also heavily involved in High Performance Computing (HPC). How did this happen?
SGI bought Cray, the supercomputer poster child, in 1996. SGI immediately used Cray’s engineering expertise to design and manufacture the Origin 2000, a massively scalable supercomputer. Within Cray’s product line was a machine called the Cray Superserver 6400, which used Sun’s Solaris and was powered by HyperSPARC processors.
Clearly SGI didn’t want to support a rival’s operating system or processor architecture, so they quickly sold the Superserver team to Sun. Sun in turn used this new team, which at the time was developing on the UltraSPARC based Starfire project, to produce the E10k.
Both Sun and SGI continued to produce on the expertise gained from Cray, with Sun releasing the SF15k and SF25k servers, aimed at large companies, and SGI designing the Origin 3000 and Altix supercomputers.
Although the Starfire server line from Sun was initially targetted to business, Sun quickly realised that they could cluster these powerful servers and so created a product for High Performance Computing (HPC) customers. As clustered solutions began to dominate the high performance computing market Sun turned to their low level server machines, applying their clustering and scalability expertise from the top end machines, and developing a line of HPC solutions.
Faced with shrinking markets Silicon Graphics took the same decision, designing a line of smaller products to complement their successful top end high performance computing machines.
With both companies now becoming focussed on Intel and AMD based processors, they continue to refine the products and engineering lessons gained from the Cray purchase by SGI over a decade ago.
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