China Daily is reporting that SGI plans to double the size of its Chinese workforce in anticipation of a fivefold increase in business in the region over the next three years. As the fourth-largest high-performance computing and cloud-computing equipment provider worldwide by sales revenue, SGI said it will add a new office in the southwest city of Chengdu and increase investment in the Chinese market to compete with international rivals such as Hewlett-Packard Corp and IBM Corp.
As China continues to develop, Barrenechea predicts that eventually “everything in the world will be modeled or simulated on computer, even potato chips”. His company already works with the US potato chip brand Pringles to find the optimal speed of packaging potato chips while preventing them from flying off the production line by running simulations on a high-performance computer.
SGI has a research and development center in Shanghai – SGI’s only one outside the United States – and a total of about 40 employees in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hong Kong. According to Barrenechea, SGI will purchase about $200 million in computer components from China in the next 12 months, accounting for half of its global purchases. Read the Full Story.
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