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By Tim Little, CEO HECMS -- At the SGI ICE launch meeting in DC this week, I was able to get a few brief moments with Bo Ewald the Old/New CEO of SGI as Bo lightly jokes. However the task and seriousness of Ewald’s tireless effort to bring SGI back into the hunt for the top HPC position is on. Bo, with his experience at LNXI and combined with a long ponderous look at SGI from the outside, sees a lot of potential for the company that will celebrate its 25th anniversary this summer. Ewald gave three reasons for returning SGI for a second time: First the remaining employees are dedicated and truly care, secondly the customer base that has stayed with SGI (noting) some have really stuck their necks to show support, and thirdly SGI’s potential to position itself into today’s HPC Market Place. Based on data collected from SC06, HECMS places SGI in a virtual tie with Cray and HP for the 4th most selected vendor. The DC meeting was the launch for SGI’s ICE product. After speaking with 150 customers over the past 80 days, Bo stated there were three very common themes which will prove challenging. First on the list is performance. Customers are not experiencing or all that excited to get a fraction of peak performance. The SMP style systems delivered good peak while many of the today’s top performance systems only deliver a fraction of the peak advertised / publicized performance. Second most noted is price/performance. Just think about a system advertised at pennies per peak flop when the actual cost is dollars once the system’s sustained performance is considered. Lastly is the amount of data that can be generated and the ability to actually do something with all this data besides storing it on disk and tape.… The sum of all this talk and chit/chat is a new direction within SGI. Bo has an agenda and that agenda is to improve system performance and decrease complexity in hardware and software. Not an easy task but a task he is up to none the less. On the performance side Bo noted SGI has completed Oracle application benchmarks that are 4 to 100 times faster than anything available on the market today. This significant performance gain in Oracle performance was realized when an SGI ICE system was assembled with 4 or 8 TeraBytes of main memory, allowing the entire Oracle data base to be memory resident. Again, based on customer feedback the analysis of the generated data is a huge issue and SGI is tracking to take the customer concern head on. System reliability issues are always concern per Ewald comments and SGI has come up with a solution for that too. Cables and memory appear to be the critical failure points in most systems. To resolve the cable issue SGI has gone to an infiniband driven backplane eliminating a major share of the cables. Another area SGI is spending a great time of effort is getting their large systems up and running quickly after installation. Gene Quagila a 20+ year Intel veteran was also present at the SGI ICE launch meeting. Gene took some to explain the market leading partnership SGI and Intel has built upon for a number of years. This long term relationship has produced some major improvements in the HPC arena. Armed with the hot out of the assembly room Akota-I HPC specifically designed motherboard, SGI is coming to market with the best performance available based on the Intel chip suite. Gene went on to mention that Intel has an 80 core chip in the lab running a Teraflop. With new products that SGI is known and loved for, a solid commitment from its employees and customer base, SGI is positioned to see brighter days. In closing remarks Bo stated he is looking for continued customer support, advice on how to move through this market and truly believed SGI’s 2 to 3 years HPC market plan will again establish SGI as the leading preferred HPC vendor.