Silicon Graphics Computer Solution Inventor

Silicon Graphics, Inc (SGI) is a company which is involved in manufacturing high performance computing solutions that includes both computer software and hardware. Founded by Jim Clark and Abbey Silverstone in 1982, SGI was initially a maker of 3D graphics display terminals. In 1981, the company was incorporated as a California corporation and in January 1990 reincorporated as a Delaware corporation.

Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, Silicon Graphicss initial products were based on the Geometry Engine. This was mainly done because of Clark's background in computer graphics and developed at Stanford University. The first VLSI implementation of a geometry pipeline was the Geometry Engine. Initially funding was from the Mayfield Fund venture capital group.

Silicon Graphics Inc's first generation products included the Integrated Raster Imaging System (IRIS 1000), based on the Motorola 68000 microprocessor with a motherboard design related to the Sun-1 workstation, incorporated with a Multibus and Internet. In 1984, models 1000 and 1200, the first entries in the 1000 series graphics terminals; peripherals to be connected to a general-purpose computer to provide graphical raster display abilities.

Rapidly, Silicon Graphics evolved its machines into workstations with the IRIS 2000 series- its second product line. It started using the UNIX System V operating system. With the IRIS 3000 series the height of the machines using Motorola CPUs was reached high. The IRIS 3130 was quite impressive and powerful to support a complete 3D animation and rendering package without mainframe support. The company switched to using the MIPS RISC microprocessor architecture, with the introduction of the IRIS 4D series whose machines are more powerful and able to address more memory specially on television and film.

In 1992, MIPS commercially released the first 64-bit RISC microprocessor, the R4000. The end of production for MIPS/IRIX systems was announced in August 2006 and as of 29 December 2006, MIPS/IRIX products were no longer generally available from Silicon Graphics Inc. SGI offered access to its high performance 3D graphics subsystems through a proprietary API known as IRIS Graphics Language (IRIS GL) which became more hard to maintain and use, for its added features. Later OpenGL API was reformed to set-up an industry-wide consortium to maintain its standard.

In 1993, an SGI computer with the FSN three-dimensional file system navigator appeared in the movie Jurassic Park. Silicon Graphics purchased Alias Research and Wavefront Technologies and merged the companies into Alias Wavefront, currently known as Alias Systems Corporation. It purchased the well-known supercomputer manufacturer for $740 million in Feb 1996.

In the late 1990s Silicon Graphics took an attempt to introduce its own family of Intel-based workstations running Windows NT, but it proved to be a financial disaster. In 1998, an announcement was made by SGI that future generations machines would be based not on their own MIPS processors, but the new super-chip from Intel, the Itanium. SGI built the supercomputer Columbia for the NASA Ames Research Center, which broke the world record for computer speed in October 2004. Last year, SGI announced Altix 4700 system with 1,024 processors and 4 TB of memory running a single Linux system image.Wikipedia