SGI was building these enormous supercomputers with the NUMA architecture, kind of like a cluster of super fast units with fast interconnects and a OS and suppo

SGI was building these enormous supercomputers with the NUMA architecture, kind of like a cluster of super fast units with fast interconnects and a OS and support software so you could actually use it. This is one of the less photogenic setups: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altix#/media/File%3AUs-nasa-columbia.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altix#/media/File%3AUs-nasa-co... If you can make your problem fit the architecture you can work on enormous tasks. It wasn’t bad stuff at all but probably impossible to make money on. Commodity hardware improved so fast they couldn’t keep up.