SGI, the Silicon Valley-based maker of supercomputers whose customers include the likes of professor Stephen Hawking and NASA, has appointed Jorge Luis Titinger as its new president and CEO.

Titinger replaces Ronald Verdoorn, who has been performing executive duties in the interim since the previous permanent CEO Mark Barrenchea stepped down at the beginning of 2011.

“SGI is at the forefront of technical computing,” Titinger said. “I am excited to be part of the new SGI, building on one of Silicon Valley's great brands and fully exploiting the opportunities in HPC, Big Data and the Cloud.”

Titinger comes to SGI from Verigy. He was CEO of the company, which designs and manufactures test systems for the semiconductor industry.

His resume also includes past senior roles at FormFactor, KLA-Tencor, Applied Materials and HP.

SGI is a well-known player in the high-performance computing space.

Some of its recent customer wins include the Cosmos Consortium, a team led by the popular physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking. Working out of the University of Cambridge, the consortium is using SGI’s Altix UV 1000 system to shed more light on nothing less than the origins of the universe.

In November 2011, SGI announced that the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration selected its ICE high-performance computing platform to extend the computing power of its Pleiades supercomputer system.

The US federal government’s space agency uses Pleiades – which in November was considered the seventh most powerful supercomputer in the world – for research, modeling and simulation work to plan and support space missions.