[Beowulf] Rackable / SGI

[Greg Lindahl]

On Thu, Apr 02, 2009 at 10:32:22AM +0200, Kilian CAVALOTTI wrote:

> Anyway, I was thinking about companies like Penguin or Scalable, designing 
> their own hardware products, like Relions or JackRabbits, and not just 
> reselling Supermicro boxes. Unless I'm mistaken on the fact that those systems 
> are somewhat different from off-the-shelf boxes. 

You would be mistaken. I can't name the Relion by eye, but there are a
ton of people selling the 48-disk building block that is Sun's
Thumper, which seems to be the chassis is of the JackRabbit. Sun
bought the hardware from someone else, and the deal wasn't
exclusive. Now there are probably multiple manufacturers.

> So, to get back to the original discussion, SGI disappearing from the 
> landscape means one less option to choose from.

You think SGI designed the hardware for their non-shared-memory
clusters?  I don't thnk so.

-- greg