The company changed its name from Silicon Graphics to SGI, but what else has changed?
ZDNet Australia talks to Bill Trestrail, managing director Australia/NZ on how the company can shape this region's future.
Question: Many people viewed the name change from Silicon Graphics to SGI as an attempt to distance itself from the image of a graphics-oriented company. Is this still true?
Answer: Not at all. This year we are celebrating 20 years of graphics innovation.
SGI once again defines where the graphics and visualisation market is going with a breakthrough concept called Visual Area Networking. With Visual Area Networking users can interact with visualisation supercomputers anywhere they are, with any client deviceââ,¬"individually or as a community of users. It allows globally dispersed teams of people to collaborate, visualise, and interact with data in ways never previously possible. This is enabling critical decision makers to participate from remote locations in collaborative processes.
What would you say then is SGI's core business?
SGI is exclusively focused on solving the next class of challenges for technical and creative markets. It is SGI's goal to provide the power for all significant technical and creative breakthroughs of the 21st century:
- In defense, the digital battlefield, enhanced security, homeland defense, simulation/training, science and manufacturing.
- In the media and broadcast community, the move to digital technologies for media management and serving. Additionally, we continue to focus on the high quality end of the content creation market.
- In global oil and gas exploration, increasing return on investment by increasing the potential for finding oil and gas.
- In sciences, life sciences, genomics, proteomics and computational chemistry, environmental sciences, material sciences as well as advanced medical imaging to help cure life-threatening diseases and save lives through advanced surgical procedures. 5. In manufacturing we remain focused on high-performance computing (for crash test and CAE), virtual environments (design review and ergonomics), and Multi-disciplinary Optimisation (MDO). Many of these solutions come from automotive and aerospace industries but we are finding they equally apply in many other industries such as large construction, ship building, mining industry, etc.
Is the company still changing? In what way?
We remain extremely focused on our core competencies and industries. However, as we broaden into new solutions in these industries we have broadened the services that we offer. We have a relatively small but very specialised professional services business that is helping our clients by filling gaps in markets that are very specialisedââ,¬" areas such as Digital Asset Management and interactive, immersive visualisation.
In the last 18 months we have significantly strengthened our storage solutions and we now have the premier high-performance storage solution for the technical and creative markets. We are pursuing this area of the market very aggressively.
What can SGI bring to the storage hardware market?
SGI is delivers on what SANs have been promising for years. We provided a high-performance, shared, heterogenous, low-cost, centralised management SAN environment. Our solutions in this area comprise of a combination of software and hardware. Our CXFS file system is the -magic" that enables us to deliver on this promise.
The CXFS 2.1 shared file system software simplifies the deployment of a SAN and the management of multiple operating systems. CXFS makes it possible for system administrators in technical and creative environments to manage their data-intensive workflow more efficiently and cost-effectively than other solutions on the market.
SGI recently announced a new integrated SAN Server solution that combines the performance and scalability of a SAN with the connectivity and file sharing of Network-Attached Storage (NAS).
Globally, SGI has recently announced several big deals with the likes of Lockheed Martin Aeronautics and Daimler Chrysler. What are some of the bigger SGI deals here in Australia?
Some of our customers in our region here include General Motors, University of Queensland, State Rail Authority, University of Tasmania, major upgrades to the F1-11 simulator, and WETAââ,¬"Lord of the Rings.
On a recent visit to Australia, SGI CEO Bob Bishop (also an Aussie) bemoaned the lack of interest here in promoting science and technology. Do you share his concerns that Australia could eventually be in danger of being -taken over" by -higher tech" countries?
At one level yes. We really risk a danger of becoming left behind in technology. I don't think it is just Australia either. I heard Craig Barrett (CEO) from Intel saying similar things and broadening the issue to much of the developed world. If you look at the number of tertiary students being graduated in India and China in technology and science, they dwarf even the US in the number of trained scientists they are turning out on a yearly basis. Admittedly they don't have the foundation to work from but with determination and investment this can come and quickly.
I think there is a community issue here. The Australian community broadly does not have a vision for the importance of science and technology for the future of our economy. In many of the developing countries there appears to be a broad acceptance that the way to get their economies to be major players on the world stage is through technological advancements.
Many call for the government to spend more money on innovation and technologies but the community as a whole is not behind this over other more immediate issues. This is not a sustainable approach. We need a complete community approachââ,¬"education, business, the broader community, and government. The Government needs to take a whole-of-government leadership approach to this issue. The Government is doing many good things in investing in research but I think it is becoming increasingly isolated with a lack of business commitment and general community endorsement.
There is generally awareness at many levels in our community re the importance of science and technology. What seems to be missing is a clear vision about where we want to be in 20, 30, or 50 years and a plan for getting there.
Who will put the plan together?
SGI believes that government and the private sector must work together to form a powerful alliance to drive economic development through the export of Australian expertiseââ,¬"within a virtual environment.
Our SGI Reality Centre facilities coupled with our Visual Area Networking system provides a platform for our leading scientists, industrial designers, institutions of higher learning, and healthcare industry to compete on an equal footing with the economic powers of the North. We believe this form of integration with other developed nations is essential to maintaining Australia's status within the OECD. SGI has a vision of seeing Australian expertise become an integral part of the design/review process and the decision cycle for many world-leading discoveries and developmentsââ,¬"as Bob outlined in his recent visit.
I believe that we must excite the youth in our community about technology, engineering and research and we must do this in a striking way. We need to communicate with the youth in a way that is absorbing and exciting to them and that leads them to careers in these areas.
As an enabler of technical excellence and creative innovation, SGI is excited about the prospect of bringing the best minds and the most sophisticated computing resources together to provide Australian organisations with a unique competitive edge in the areas of land management, space exploration, and satellite broadband communications from being able to be virtually present, in a fully immersive environment whilst physically present in the South.
SGI has also said that it has a vested interest in fostering creativity in Australia. How does it plan to do this?
SGI has already started to foster creativity in Australia, through our investment in The Rumble Group, our Chief Executive's active role in the International Advisory Panel for the South Australian Government, our support of up and coming technical and creative professionals from institutions such as the Silicon Graphics Centre at Enmore TAFE in Sydney (where SGI provides a high-performance computer).
We are currently working with some institutions to propose a CRC in convergent areas of visualisation and the Arts where we will invest significant time and resources.
Local development of our CXFS software in Australia is another good example of how we utilise world-class Australian resources to export to the world.
What percentage of SGI revenues are spent on R&D?
SGI has an industry-leading commitment to R&D. SGI has invested 10-15 percent of annual revenue in R&D over the past 10 years; competitors typically invest less than 10 percent per annum. This year our R&D budget is at about 14 percent of our revenue. Our significant investment in R&D has led to a number of innovative developments.
Namely, the development of the Geometry Engine, RISC processing, real-time graphics, shared-memory supercomputing, SGI NUMA architecture, and now the ability to collaborate and visualise complex data remotely and in real time using Visual Area Networking.
How much of this is spent in Australia?
We spend approximately $6 million per year on R&D in Australia. We employ some 20 researchers in our Melbourne lab and outsource a further 20+ engineers on a contract basis to Adacel Technologies.
You mentioned the -Visualisation of Data". To what exactly does the term refer?
At the most basic level it refers to visual representation of data. I am not talking about charts and graphs but very complex concepts and situations. There are a couple of facts that need to be considered.
We take 13 years of our lives to be educated and during this time we learn to take concepts and situations and put them into a 2D text-based representation. Yet we operate in a visual world in a very efficient fashion. Our eye is a high bandwidth path to the brain. We can look at something and understand masses of information extremely quickly. Visualisation of data is not different.
Additionally, visualisation is a truly universal language and crosses cultures, scientific disciplines and languages. We see many of our clients getting breakthroughs in effectiveness and profitability by using the visual form. By putting people from different scientific roles into a visual problem-solving realm they cross disciplines and communicate in new ways, challenging each other's perspective in real time. They have a common language and they are able to interact with the data set in real time. This interactivity is key. The ability of the environment to make changes on the fly, re-compute, and re-render in real time is crucial.
What is -Visual Area Networking"?
Solving the biggest problems requires the best minds . . . but increasingly people are either globally mobile or in remote locations, while advanced visualisation resources remain fixed. To gain access to this complex data, a copy must be transferred to users. To store, process, interact with and visualise the data, very powerful systems are required local to the users plus very high-bandwidth networks and enhanced security.
With Visual Area Networking users can interact with visualisation supercomputers anywhere they are, with any client deviceââ,¬"individually or as a community of users. Visual Area Networking removes the requirement to have either the data or the advanced visualisation capability local to the user. It allows globally dispersed teams of people to visualise and interact with data in ways never previously possible.
Visual Area Networking delivers universal access to advanced visualisation, with any type of client device, on standard networks, to remote users or to groups for collaboration.
What percentage of SGI's global revenues comes from Australia?
SGI Australia contributes between two and three percent of SGI's global revenue.
The supercomputer market is growing. How do you see the future of this market developing in Australia?
Australia has distinct advantages in the land management, biosciences, and our history of remote communicationsââ,¬"like our school of the air initiative and our heritage in radio telescopes and radio communications.
SGI believes we can utilise this heritage and expertise to export these skills to the Northââ,¬"utilising high-performance computing, advanced visualisation and the placement of our skilled resources in a fully immersive, photo-realistic virtual environment in real-time, without suffering the brain drain issues of the past.
And this is all possible because the market has changed in our favour with the re-emergence of the importance of our core markets. In particular, government, Defence, science, and broadcast and the fact that e-commerce computers do not meet the needs of our technical and creative customers.
As one of the founding members of the Trillian project, how does SGI currently view the future of Linux and open source?
SGI has released a reasonable amount of its IP into the open source community with some components making its way into the core of the Linux code in both the 32-bit and 64-bit Linux. We see the open source movement continuing to gain momentum and more appeal. We continue to work with the Open Source community in a very constructive way. We currently have no specific hardware platforms running Linux in our product range, but SGI has previously announced support for the Intel Itanium 2 processor as a part of the company's high-performance computing server family. SGI has the world's most scalable shared-memory system architecture, which is designed to meet the particular needs of technical users. With that announcement, SGI extends its unique system architecture to support Itanium 2 processor-based systems running a high-performance Linux operating system implementation.
About SGI Australia
SGI is a major global provider of high-performance computing technology. The company's solutions, ranging from desktop workstations and servers to supercomputers, deliver advanced computing and 3D visualisation capabilities to scientific, engineering, and creative professionals and large enterprises. SGI also creates software for design, Internet, and entertainment applications.
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