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Sun and Silicon Graphics both started out as workstation companies, making some of the earliest UNIX workstations available. Over the years, both companies have migrated into the server market, and now not only produce some of the fastest servers available, but are also very involved in High Performance Computing (HPC). How did this happen?

Silicon Graphics bought Cray, the supercomputer pioneer, in 1996. Silicon Graphics immediately used Cray’s engineering expertise to design and manufacture the Origin 2000, a massively powerful supercomputer. Within Cray’s product line was a machine called the Cray Superserver 6400, which used Sun’s Solaris and HyperSPARC processors.

Obviously Silicon Graphics didn’t want to support a rival’s operating system or CPU architecture, so they immediately sold the Superserver division to Sun. Sun in turn used this new division, which at the time was developing on the UltraSPARC based Starfire project, to build the E10000.

Both Sun and Silicon Graphics continued to build on the knowledge gained from Cray, with Sun Microsystems producing the SF15k and SF25k machines, aimed at big companies, and Silicon Graphics making the Origin 3000 and Altix supercomputers.

Although the E10k server line from Sun was initially targetted to business, Sun soon discovered that they could cluster these powerful computers and so created a product for High Performance Computing (HPC) customers. As clustered solutions began to dominate the high performance computing market Sun turned to their low level server machines, applying their clustering and scalability knowledge from the top end products, and developing a line of HPC solutions.

Faced with shrinking budgets SGI took the same path, creating a line of smaller servers to complement their successful top end high performance computing products.

With both companies now increasingly focussed on Intel and AMD based CPUs, they continue to refine the products and engineering lessons learned from the Cray acquisition by Silicon Graphics over a decade ago.