In an effort to broaden Linux's appeal, SuSE Linux will bundle its new SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 with SGI's Altix 3000 servers and superclusters.
The company plans to start shipping the bundled product in October, it said. The move expands SuSE's 64-bit products and paves the way for scaling Linux to 128 processors, the latest effort to turbo-charge the increasingly popular open-source operating system. SuSE and SGI said they would work together to develop a 128-processer version of Linux.
"SuSE shares SGI's vision of a broadly scalable and robust Linux environment for technical and scientific computing," Dave Parry, general manger of SGI's server and platform group, said.
Mountain View, Calif.-based SGI makes specialized computers for complicated graphics tasks, such as the creation of special effects for movies or the visualization of airflow in car design. Most of its systems use Irix, the company's version of Unix, in combination with MIPS processors. But earlier this year, SGI launched the Altix 3000, which is based on Linux and Intel Itanium processors.
A few weeks ago, SGI said it would ship a 128-bit Altix machine in the spring.
Both companies are aiming to expand their reach through the agreement. SGI gains a standardized version of Linux, which it hopes will attract more applications to its machines.
In a statement announcing the partnership, Oracle said it welcomed the deal because customers running its software on the SGI servers using SuSE's Linux would have access to Oracle's support for the operating system.
SuSE, for its part, gets another high-profile endorsement of its version of Linux and a commitment to further soup up the operating system. In June, Hewlett-Packard expanded its relationship with SuSE, announcing that customers could get SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 bundled with its ProLiant line machines, which mainly uses Intel's Xeon chips, or with its servers based on Itanium chips.
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