Day 72 - Back in Silicon Valley

After six years from my first trip here, I came back to where it all started! Revolution, at the Computer History Museum was an amazing show just in the middle of a God blessed land, even if a lot of startups around closed compared to 2006.

Some pictures if you want to read more...

SGI VW540 @ TC Labs

On january 11 1999, Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) announced a new line of "desktop workstations for visual computing" which could take advantage of the power and flexibility of Microsoft Windows NT.
These workstations, the Silicon Graphics 320 and the Silicon Graphics 540, were custom-designed for high end "visual computing" applications such as video production, 3D medical imaging, Computer Aided Design (CAD), film and television special effects, and topography mapping. They were the first SGI machines hosting Intel Pentium III Xeon CPUs and executind an operating system different from IRIX.
A 540 visual workstation arrived some days ago at TC Labs, enriching our SGI TC Project collection. Now we have an Octane, an O2, a Fuel and of course the new VW540 beast. The system comes from Germany and, although in good conditions, has not any OS installed. This is the running commentary of how I tried to revive it from the ashes.

SGI Octane III

dal sito web SGI: "Octane III takes high performance computing out of the data center and puts it at the deskside. It combines the immense power and performance capabilities of a high-performance cluster with the portability and usability of a workstation to enable a new era of personal innovation in strategic science, research, development and visualization. In contrast with standard 2P workstations with only eight cores and moderate memory capacity, Octane III's superior design permits up to 80 high-performance cores and nearly 1TB of memory. Octane III significantly accelerates time-to-results for over 50 HPC applications and supports the latest Intel® processors to capitalize on greater levels of performance, flexibility and scalability. Pre-configured with system software, cluster set up is a breeze".  Magari le venderanno anche al supermercato...

Jim Clark e il premio alla sua visione

Jim Clark è stato il fondatore di Silicon Graphics Inc. e di Netscape nei gloriosi anni della grafica e di Internet 1.0: quest'anno è stato uno dei quattro vincitori di SDForum 2009 Visionary Award. il prestigioso premio viene riconosciuto a tutte quelle figure che con la loro visione hanno permesso ad un qualche progetto di impresa di diventare importante. Il riconoscimento è già stato assegnato negli anni scorsi a personalità molto note come ad esempio Bill Gates, John Chambers, Diane Greene, Carol Bartz, Ray Ozzie, Donna Dubinsky, Michael Moritz and Walt Mossberg.
Interessante il discorso fatto da Jim Clark in merito all'importanza dell'Università, in particolare di Stanford, sulla capacità di incentivare, sopportare, e sviluppare le idee d'impresa dei giovani.

Oh well...

Nonostante la nuova entrata in Chapter 11 e la vendita pressochè totale di tutti gli assets a Rackable Systems, a noi piace pensare così...