Rackable's x86 servers have been sold to large and midsize data centers primarily in the U.S., and the SGI name is more easily recognized in Europe and Asia, Mark Barrenechea, Rackable's president and CEO, said in an interview Monday.

"We've gone from being a U.S.-centric company to a global company," he said. The new SGI will have about 1,300 employees, compared to Rackable's 300, and it will retrain some of Silicon Graphics' overseas staff to sell and support Rackable's x86 equipment, Barrenechea said.

The new SGI will also continue to develop and support the high-performance computing systems that Silicon Graphics was known for, he said. "There should be no disruption to Silicon Graphics customers," Barrenechea said.

"While clustered computing is certainly bleeding into the low end of HPC, the high end of shared-memory HPC systems is still a very different market," he said.

The combined company will be able to address "all the toughest computing problems, whether it is serving up a billion videos a day through YouTube, modeling weather patterns, helping intelligence and defense agencies, making sure race cars go as fast as they can, or doing scientific research," Barrenechea said.