Sun Microsystems and SGI both started out as workstation manufacturers, building some of the earliest UNIX workstations on the market. Over the years, both companies have moved 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 occur?

SGI bought Cray, the supercomputer pioneer, in 1996. SGI quickly used Cray’s engineering prowess to design and build the Origin 2000, a massively scalable supercomputer. Within Cray’s product line was a supercomputer called the Cray Superserver 6400, which ran Sun’s Solaris and was powered by HyperSPARC CPUs.

Obviously SGI didn’t want to support a rival’s operating system or CPU architecture, so they immediately sold the Superserver division to Sun Microsystems. Sun Microsystems in turn used this new division, which at the time was developing on the UltraSPARC based Starfire project, to design the E10k.

Both Sun Microsystems and SGI continued to design on the knowledge gained from Cray, with Sun Microsystems producing the SF15k and SF25k servers, aimed at big data centres, and SGI building the Origin 3000 and Altix supercomputers.

Although the SF15k server line from Sun Microsystems was initially aimed to business, Sun Microsystems quickly realised that they could link these powerful machines and so designed a solution for High Performance Computing (HPC) users. As clustered solutions began to dominate the high performance computing world Sun Microsystems turned to their entry level server offerings, applying their clustering and scalability expertise from the high end products, and developing a range of HPC solutions.

Faced with shrinking markets SGI took the same decision, designing a line of smaller servers to complement their existing high end high performance computing products.

With both companies now increasingly focussed on Intel and AMD based solutions, they continue to refine the machines and engineering lessons gained from the Cray purchase by SGI over a decade ago.