Siggraph

A number of years ago, I attended a press conference where the founder of SGI strutted before an NAB audience of broadcast and post executives, stating in no uncertain terms that in a few years his company would “own” the industry. SGI’s big, bold booth made a statement commensurate with his claim. It was the 1990‘s afterall, when the high-end computer graphics market for feature films and commercials took off, due in no small part to this upstart Silicon Valley success story with it’s high flying, free spending attitude.

Fade out/fade in to Siggraph 2006. I spent 15 minutes trying to find the company‘s sole representative, now holding forth at a table in a partner‘s booth. Times have changed. SGI has been declared dead many times over the years since that original presentation by Jim Clark. Its share price has plummeted, staff has been cut again and again. Their luxe Mountain View campus was sold to Google a while back; a bankruptcy filing was made this past May.

But don’t sell them short. The company still leads the post industry at the very highest levels, due in part to its seminal research as well as a hefty bank account of patents and other intellectual property.

Top facilities such as eFilm, Laser Pacific, and Technicolor rely on its bulletproof digital cinema mastering chops, render management, and high-speed storage offerings.

At the show, I learned the latest about their deal with PipelineFX to marry its Qube! render farm management system benefits to an SGI server and Network Attached Storage (NAS) workflow solution. Built around the new SGI Altix XE servers (these use the latest Intel Xeon dual-core processors) and SGI Infinite Storage NAS technology, the new Render Management Solution could play big in top shelf companies that turn out animation, special effects, and games on a regular basis.

PipelineFX‘s Qube! combines the latest thinking about how to best handle batch queuing, distributed processing, and render farm management. Meanwhile, it directly integrates with most of the common 3D modeling and rendering apps out there. The software maximizes job throughput by distributing the millions of computational tasks that occur during the graphics rendering and software build processes.

So what’s the verdict? The company has spent the last 7 years or so proving the nay sayers wrong, but this brush with collapse seems mightly close. So would I call SGI down for the count?

No, not yet. The sight of the gallows, as the saying goes, tends to bring the mind into sharp focus. So let’s wait and see.