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Silicon Graphics have an enviable reputation as an R&D powerhouse, devleoping powerful graphics workstations that created the effects for many Hollywood films. Less well known are the high end servers and supercomputers that Silicon Graphics sell.

When Silicon Graphics bought legendary supercomputer company Cray in the mid 1990s, they used some of Cray’s expertise, and developed their own line of monster super computers. The Origin 2000 was the first of these. Powered by MIPS CPUs, the Origin 2000 could range from 8 CPUs up to 1024. Adding special graphics cabinets created the Onyx, a graphics supercomputer of massive power.

Then SGI developed the Origin 3000, expanding on the previous design. The Origin 3000 used modular ‘bricks’ – containing processors, IO cards, or even graphics cards – to provide very customised configurations. Again, scaling from 8 CPUs to 1024 – with rumours of custom 2048 CPU computers being built for government labs.

These computers were Single System Image (SSI) computers. Despite the large number of processors in them, they ran one copy of the IRIX operating system, and appeared to the end user exactly the same way as a normal compuyter would.

Silicon Graphics are carrying on their development with the current line of Altix scaleable supercomputers, based around Intel’s Itanium CPU and running Linux. With multi-core Itaniums available rumours abound of giant 4096 core SSI systems tucked away in government labs.