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SGI Company History
Silicon Graphics, Inc. is founded by 8 persons in 1982. SGI is manufacturer of workstations, servers and also sells supercomputers and clusters for effortful graphical computing. SGI has his headquarters in Mountain View, California and is leaded by Rick Beluzzo as CEO. Specialized in virtual 3D representation and animation with it was possible with SGI technique and IRIX to create movies like Jurassic Park, Final Fantasy - The Spirits Within and Ice Age.
The Altix series was introduced in 2003 and shall be able to manage up to 2048 CPUs and 16 tbyte main memory in a cluster in the maximum upgrade stage. As an operating system can beside IRIX also be used the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for servers and super cluster systems. For example SGI sells Altix 3000 servers with 64 Itanium 2 64-bit processors of Intel. The full equipped system costs about 1.1 million U.S. dollars. Altix 350 servers with 4 to 16 Itanium 2 64-bit processors are new from the factory to have for a amount of about 21,000 U.S. dollars. Altix systems can be integrated by the NUMA architecture as nodes in Cluster or as single devices modular extended. Soon, a model with up to 128 CPUs also shall be available. The SGI Altix 4700 servers support SuSE Linux enterprise server 9 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.
Company Timeline
1982 Silicon Graphics is founded1983 First graphical terminal solution (IRISŪ 1000 )
1984 First workstation
1986 Start on the stock exchange of Silicon Graphics
1991 IRIX 4.0 operating system published
1992 MIPS Computer Systems Inc. was taken over for 200 million dollars and separated to the subsidiary company MIPS Technologies
1993 Contract with Time Warner for the development of new technologies, completion of a contract with Nintendo for the development of the N64 game console
1994 Foundation of Silicon Studio, Inc. for the digital and interactive media market
1995 Take-over of Alias Research Inc. and Wavefront Inc. which are summarized to the subsidiary company Alias/Wavefront
1996 Fusion with Cray Research (supercomputer), new SGI product is the visualization computer Onyx 2 with SMP. Establishment of VRML 2.0 as a 3D-Internet standard
1997 Release of the Octane POWER workstation, purchase of the company ParaGraph International (3D internet software), sales volume of 3.7 billion dollars, 79 million dollars profit, approx. 10,500 employees (of this 7,700 in the USA) and 42 branch offices worldwide. Manufacturing facilities in Mountain View and Sunnyvale (California), Chippewa Falls (Wisconsin) as well as Cortaillod (Switzerland).
1998 IRIX 6.5 published
Short info of 1999
- Bob Bishop becomes Chief Executive Officer
- SGI separates from MIPS
- Silicon Graphics names himself in SGI
- SGI installs Linux Cluster with 128 CPUs
- SGI builds Linux Cluster with intel IA-64 processors
Short info of 2000
- SGI cooperates with VA Linux and Nvidia
- SGI separates from Cray
- Compiler for IA 64 as open source
- Linux Cluster with SMP servers
Short info of 2001
- Internet server for e-commerce published
- SGI Origin 3800 system supercomputer with 1,024 CPUs and 512 CPUs is used for the clima research by NASA
- SGI released his developed XFS file system
Short info of 2004
SGI sells the company Alia with the 3D-Software Maya
Short info of 2005
- dropping sales and profits
- SGI shares are taken out from the stock exchange because of to low sales volume
Short info of 2006
- Dennis McKenna becomes the new CEO
- SGI applies for creditor protection
- the reorganization is announced to strengthen the enterprise and improve the financial situation
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| Film: Final Fantasy - The Spirits Within | Film: Ice Age | Film: Monster AG | SGI Origin 3400 Server |
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| SGI Octane2+ Workstation |