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New focus at SGI
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Vice President of Engineering Rick Chapek is SGI’s top man at the Chippewa Falls facilities, the company’s international headquarters for manufacturing.
Contributed photo
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By Mark Gunderman mark.gunderman@lee.net
In a way, business isn’t all that complicated. Give your customers what they want, and they’ll buy.
If you’re making big cars that go fast and the customers start wanting small cars that get good mileage, you change to meet demand — or die trying.
Well, it’s not quite as simple as that, especially if your product is high performance computers and the customers are the U.S. government or a lot of private enterprises with rapidly-changing needs.
SGI, once known as Silicon Graphics Inc., knows firsthand the simple principles and the complicating factors. Company leaders will admit that for a while, SGI wasn’t getting it right and some rough times came upon the Silicon Valley company with its worldwide manufacturing headquarters in Chippewa Falls.
But now the company is on the rebound, thanks to a fundamental change to meet market demands.
“Our strategy hasn’t really changed dramatically,” said Vice President of Engineering Rick Chapek. “But our product profile has.”
Flight simulation grounded
Most people in the Chippewa Valley who aren’t in the computer industry may think of SGI as a company that makes some pretty neat gadgets. After all, aren’t they the ones that make flight simulators for U.S. military pilots in training? Isn’t Spiderman able to swing from building to building thanks to amazing computer graphics driven by SGI computers? Why, it wasn’t long ago that Monday Night Football had a fancy new intro segment made possible by SGI hardware.
Well. . . not anymore.
To the extent that movie graphics and flight simulators require the manipulation of vast amounts of data at high speeds, SGI is still very much in those games.
But, frankly, it’s not hard to find computers that can produce graphic images that once were the hallmark of SGI.
“The visualization market has been completely commoditized,” Chapek said.
That is, in the supercomputer business, the machines were traditionally made of custom processors, designed for the high speed necessary to meet customer supercomputing demands. However, the technology behind the regular processors that go into home and business desktop computers started catching up with the high speed custom processors. Advancing technology linked series of computers to work on problems in parallel fashion. That, with the new processors, made it possible to achieve supercomputer results with common-commodity parts.
That wasn’t good news for SGI, as investors and employees learned.
But it hasn’t been all bad news, either. SGI is coming back strong, with the same kind of customer mix it had before, but with products meeting customers’ current needs.
Chippewa Valley Business Report readers may recall a great SGI success story with the Columbia project for NASA, delivering on a tight time frame supercomputer systems to help get the space shuttle program back in space after the re-entry disaster.
That system wasn’t delivered to perform fancy graphics, but to perform important data processing, which may include support for graphics operations.
Selling solutions
About half of SGI’s business is with the government, in one way or another. NASA and the FBI remain among the company’s most important customers.
“We’ve always done about 50 percent of our business in that area, and that hasn’t changed,” Chapek said.
But now the company specializes in handling large amounts of data, from both computing and data storage standpoints.
“We’re not just selling storage anymore as only an attached entity. We’ve broken that business unit out and people contact SGI for storage solutions, not just computing solutions,” said Chapek.
The computing solutions involve clusters — the use of a series of smaller computers connected together with standard industry connectors. SGI works with the customers on their computing and data storage needs. SGI’s solutions may not be unique, but they address the problems well.
“It’s totally a price-performance approach,” Chapek said.
The company’s flagship product is the Altix, a system that can work on a Linux platform (the open source movement in the computer industry loves SGI) and now on a Windows-based platform.
Let’s go back to that flight simulator that helped SGI build its reputation and its sales to the military.
All of those images are really just data inside the computer, and a massive amount of data at that. A flight simulator must take the user’s movements with the instruments, retrieve the appropriate data, and translate it virtually instantaneously into an image on the screen.
Whereas SGI used to be great at that on-screen image, now it is handling the storage of all that data and the speed of bringing it forward to be converted into an image.
“The real sea change came in the 2001-2003 time frame. We didn’t formally terminate our visualization team until 2003,” Chapek said.
An example of SGI’s new role can be seen in the military’s F-35 Lightning program.
Military security requirements became so severe that flight training simulation visualizations had different levels of classified status for those pilots who came in to train for the F-35, or the B-2, or some other military craft.
“A person training for one couldn’t have access to the other and they had to switch computer gear for new groups of pilots,” Chapek said.
It used to take days to switch from one visualization group to the next.
SGI developed a solution that made different parts of the data storage accessible in different circumstances.
“We’re still very mission-critical for a lot of our traditional businesses. We just play in a different way,” Chapek said.
Capturing images
Here’s another example from modern government information gathering:
Everyone realizes that the U.S. government makes extensive use of satellite images, from weather system tracking to spying on would-be terrorists. It’s been going on for years.
“The technology of high resolution satellites are circling the globe three times faster and gathering 100 times as much data,” said Chapek. To gather, manage and store that data is a computer memory problem, and SGI sells the solutions.
“The ability to capture data has far outpaced the ability to manage data,” he said.
The national security implications are obvious. The Homeland Security surveillance center uses SGI systems to monitor airspace.
New York City uses satellite images to create 3-D computer models of the entire city, watching ships coming to port and planes moving in and out and traffic patterns on the roads.
“Everything is monitored around New York City for potential terrorist activity,” Chapek said. That takes a vast amount of data storage, and SGI sells solutions.
SGI has sold a 9,086-processor system for a Department of Defense weapons modernization program, being manufactured now in Chippewa Falls.
The U.S. Air Force has turned to SGI for help with aircraft structural life extension.
“The Naval Research Lab is a huge SGI user,” Chapek said.
But it’s not just national defense.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration uses SGI equipment to model climate change, track hurricanes and monitor oceanic algae blooms that indicate weather pattern changes.
Ewald is back
Optimism is also growing at SGI because of the return of Bo Ewald.
Ewald is familiar to many of the high tech people in the Chippewa Valley as the former chief operating officer of Cray Research, and also the executive vice president and chief operating officer of SGI. He’s now returned as CEO.
Ewald has the company focused, Chapek said, and the board of directors is heavily involved in setting company direction. It met in Chippewa Falls in May.
“We differentiate ourselves with not only technology, but being able to solve a customer’s problems — particularly data storage and processing problems,” Chapek said.
They combine that with close relationships with customers, and rapid “out-of-box experience.”
That is, with computer equipment at this level of performance, installation often takes a long time, followed by troubleshooting before the customer can make full use of the machine that cost millions.
With SGI equipment, that turn-around time is the envy of the industry.
“The out-of-box experience for high performance computers from here is unrivaled,” Chapek said. “You can take a 1,000-processor machine out of the box and it’s in production in two days.”
That, as they say, is more than good enough for government work — and the highest standards of the private industry, too. s
Mark Gunderman is editor of Chippewa Valley Business Report. He can be reached at mark.gunderman@lee.net or at (715) 738-1607.
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