Bob Bishop: SGI looking for Altix OEMs

When the Top500 list of the world's most powerful computers is published Monday, the 10,240 processor "Columbia" supercomputer that Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) recently built for NASA's (National Aeronautics and Space Administration's) Ames Research Center is expected to be the number-two system on the list. Columbia is a much-needed success for SGI, which has been struggling to reclaim customers lost during an ill-fated foray into the Windows market during the late 1990s. Since taking the reins of the company in 1999, Bob Bishop, an 18-year SGI veteran, has refocused SGI on its core technical markets, and bet the company's future on the three core technologies in its Altix line of servers: the Linux operating system, Intel Corp.'s Itanium processor architecture, and SGI's own NUMAflex system design. With NUMAflex, SGI has been able to scale Linux to unprecedented levels.

Despite its remarkable technical achievements, SGI's future remains unclear. The industry has been slow to adopt the Itanium processor, and SGI has struggled to achieve profitability. Bishop called the company's most recent financial quarter, which saw SGI post a net loss of US$28 million, "disappointing," but in an interview with IDG News Service, he discussed his company's future and how he plans to bring Altix to new markets and why he has confidence that Itanium, and not Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s rival Opteron processor, is the right microprocessor for Altix. Following is an edited transcript of that interview.

IDG News Service: With your Altix systems, you have been able to build incredibly large shared-memory Linux servers. It seems that that kind of technology could be used in the commercial space, as well as the technical markets that SGI sells into. Why don't people typically use SGI machines for commercial applications like Oracle (Corp.) databases?

Bob Bishop: Of course commercial applications ultimately need something similar. Our approach to the commercial market will be through private labeling of our products. We're willing to have our machines flow into the commercial space, but we will do that through partners who will probably add their own application software, and their own support and their own label.

IDGNS: Can you name any partners that you're working with?

Bishop: We are not at the point where we can name any partners. That would be up to them.

IDGNS: What kind of companies are you looking to sign deals with?

Bishop: It would be people who are already in that space and are having some trouble managing as databases are getting larger. We just released TPC-H (Transaction Processing Performance Council Benchmark H) numbers, which were world record numbers, and that was with DB2, just as an example of what's coming.

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