SGI Acquires Linux Networx Assets, LNXI Dead? 96
anzha writes "It seems that that Linux Networx, the pioneering Linux supercomputing company, has gone belly up. SGI announced that it has bought the core assets of LNXI. Furthermore, the rumors are that the doors were locked and employees were just given their paychecks. This analysis, on the other hand, claims that SGI has 'made employment offers to many LNXI engineers.' It's unclear what kind of support will be extended to customers of LNXI's Clusterworx Advanced products. What does this mean for the future of Linux supercomputing?"
What? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Belly Up? (Score:5, Interesting)
A prudent investment. (Score:3, Interesting)
Similarly, SGI has changed a lot of their focus from their expensive cache-coherent single-system-image servers to clusters of small/cheap nodes. SGI has great compiler technology, data-management software, and systems integration knowledge. They may not, however, have great systems-management tech. You don't need that for single-system-image machines. Even the big columbia machine at nasa is only a cluster of 20 machines. You can do a lot of stuff by hand, or with creative shell scripts, when you're dealing with 20 machines. With 400, it's tougher. I'm sure this won't solve all their problems, but I bet it will help quite a bit.
Former CEO of Linux Networx Buys Old Company (Score:3, Interesting)
Chief Executive Officer
Bo Ewald joins SGI as CEO with over 25 years of relevant industry experience in the high performance computing markets. He is a seasoned industry veteran with a successful track record as a CEO.
Re:The future of Linux supercomputing (Score:2, Interesting)
Linux is very pervasive in HPC and becoming more so. Since I know a little something about Cray, the newest vector and scalar lines both use Cray Linux Environment (CLE) formerly called Compute Node Linux (CNL). Cray's CNL was released in second half of 2007 and already over half of the Cray processors in production are running CLE on the computes instead of Catamount, the very lean, proprietary compute node OS.