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Let's not forget another SGI-boosted website that originally started up at reality.sgi.com which is the International Obfuscated C Contest . The contest has now moved from SGI to its own domain www.ioccc.org hosted by Plaidworks(??).

In 1999, I contracted at SGI for a few months. Since I had an Indy R5K with a webcam, I took the opportunity to post a little "Ciannait's office" page on reality.

Ever since I contracted there, I've been known to reference The Annotated Aerial View of the Cray Research Park as evidence that yes, I worked there. I was in Building F, in the supercomputing department.

Despite my waste of bandwidth site on reality, the creative and intelligent people at SGI used it for all sorts of things. SGI folks are demoralized enough as it is, and I feel for them, considering that this resource is being taken away. What's next, the end of Ducky Day?


"During your times of trial and suffering, when you see only one set of footprints, it was then that I was riding the pogostick."

When employees start posting their CVs and Resumes (1, 2, 3)on company sites run by their employers then either the site has to go or the employees have to go... or both.

When employees start posting their CVs and Resumes (1, 2, 3)on company sites run by their employers then either the site has to go or the employees have to go... or both.

When employees start posting their CVs and Resumes (1, 2, 3)on company sites run by their employers then either the site has to go or the employees have to go... or both.

While looking around reality.sgi.com, i bumped into this page...

Nichice disk usage meter, but check out the date marked on the top of the page, when I read it, it said 07/07/19101, SGI still hasnt got the Y2K bug sorted out? TWO years late?

It's a wonder they're still going :)

Mark.
--

It no longer exists at http://Reality.SGI.com/cbrady_denver/memtest86/

Now it lives at www.MemTest86.com

Thanks Chris,
Ken Hendrickson

What version of Irix are you running?

Irix 6.5 comes with the kernel headers that you need for free.

maybe you could contact your local SGI office to see if that machine is entitled to run Irix 6.5, and if it is, where to get a media set from.

Once you have that, then you can use GCC to compile whatever you need.Alternatively, there is a good selection of freeware for SGIs at http://freeware.sgi.com

That includes a quite large amount of GPL software in binary form for you to download and install

http://reality.sgi.com/csp/

Yeah,, there are many good pages there. I discovered the shutdown yesterday when I visited http://reality.sgi.com/btd/kate-bush/. It's a really good page about the music of Kate Bush, with quite a few rare recordings.

I spent about 30 minutes on this page...

http://reality.sgi.com/chinster_studio/html/photo_ essays.html

The classic lavarand site (random numbers via Lava Lite Lamps), which is hosted on reality, is going away as well.

We are planning to bring on-line a and improved version of LavaRnd (open sourced and patent-free) at www.LavaRnd.org hopefully before reality goes away.

The classic lavarand site (random numbers via Lava Lite Lamps), which is hosted on reality, is going away as well.

We are planning to bring on-line a and improved version of LavaRnd (open sourced and patent-free) at www.LavaRnd.org hopefully before reality goes away.

Will Apple stop being innovative in terms of case design?

Cool case design does not seem to have helped these guys much, either.

What does it say about the computer consumer? One could argue that consumers are not fooled by sleek design when the utilitarian beige box is available. Or that computer buyers have no sense for visual design.

NFS-mounted root? Hmm...I'm envisioning the sexiest X-terminal in the world...a three-inch aluminum cube with an SGI 1600SW. :^) As Apple has shown the world, it isn't the technology inside your boxen that counts, it's how much the outside makes people drool.

[punch /tmp]$ diff -u xfs_announce jfs_announce
--- xfs_announce Tue May 01 08:19:51 2001
+++ jfs_announce Thu Jun 28 14:30:02 2001
@@ -1,10 +1,12 @@
-SGI is pleased to announce the 1.0 release of XFS, high-performance
-journaled file system for Linux.
+IBM is pleased to announce the v 1.0.0 release of the open source
+Journaled File System (JFS), a high-performance, and scalable file
+system for Linux.

-http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/
+http://oss.software.ibm.com/jfs

-XFS, widely recognized as the industry-leading high-performance
-filesystem, provides rapid recovery from system crashes and the
-ability to support extremely large disk farms. ... It is a
-mature technology that has been proven on thousands of IRIX
-systems as the default filesystem for all SGI customers.
+JFS is widely recognized as an industry-leading high-performance
+file system, providing rapid recovery from a system power outage or crash and the
+ability to support extremely large disk configurations. The
+open source JFS is based on proven journaled file system technology
+that is available in a variety of operating systems such as AIX and
+OS/2.

;-)

Terrible API Documentation? Hello? Microsoft's documentation is of *very* high quality! Have you ever used the MSDN Library? It rocks! Feel free to diss MS where they do things wrong, but documentation is one of the few things they're great at!

On the other hand, their STL documentation sucks rocks. I find it pretty much unusable. Luckily, SGI has some excellent docs on the STL.
--

Is anyone working on a Quantum Electrodynamic model of raytracing? Diffraction gratings would be cool. It would improve other things. Like hair, thin films, etc.

Yes, and it looks darn cool:

Stam99 Jos Stam, "Diffraction Shaders," Computer Graphics, Proc. of ACM SIGGRAPH 99, ACM Press, New York, 1999, pp. 101-110.

slideshow version

Maybe people will get confused and think about some other popular library?

Well I'm not sure what would imply that Lucas has the final say about this. All he cares is that the ILM delivers the shots, the images. Probably finance them. But it's actually up to ILM to decide what they use. They do extensive testing on new technology to have the best production pipeline possible. They even have a special agreement with SGI, called JDEI to get to test all new equipment, plus they are a beta testing site for Alias/Wavefront. Here is the press release for their renewed JEDI agreement:

SGI is Preferred Provider of Content Creation Workstations and Servers for Industrial Light & Magic

It's actually up to the ILM engineers and management to decide what to use, Lucas is not involved in that. ILM has figured out the Linux gives them a good solution. years ago when Softimage was part of M$ and ported the software to NT, ILM did several test as to the feasability of using NT in their production pipeline, but it never panned out.

Besides their SGI infrastructure they have the Mac Rebel Unit which uses macs for stuff like texture painting, matte pintings, animatics and compositing. They just use what works, and finally Linux is good enough for production work. There are also rumors that they recently bought several Digital Tru64 boxes. They also have regular Win PCs for office work. There was even an old report that they started using Linux in the engineering dept. long ago for routers or some such thing. Here are the appropiate links:

Lucas probably doesn't care, he could be using a PC or Mac for writing the screenplays. It's up to ILM to use what is best for them.

Nitpick.

I believe Zeus uses something similar to SGI's state threads, coupled with one heavyweight process per CPU. It's basically I/O multiplexing in multiple processes - a one to many process/connection relationship as opposed to a one-to-one relationship. The "threads" don't have any kernel entity associated with them, and aren't fully preemptive.

Check out http://oss.sgi.com/projects/state-threads/docs/st. html for more info.

My university has two large SGI systems that crank away on compiled fortran code day and night. Our analog EE's, biowarfare research group, and meteorology folks keep both machines at about 95% load around the clock. One machine is a shiny new Origin 3000 (96x R14K/500) and the other is an Origin 2000 (64x R10K/250). The O2K has a stack of R14K/500 CPU nodeboards and an additional 64 GB ram ready to replace its aging R10Ks, but the users keep telling the admin staff to "wait another day, my big batch job is almost done".

The decision to switch from a Cray C90 to SGI had a lot to do with SGI's on-going fortran compiler development, optimization, and obscure/rare bug hunts. Their short term Cray R&D ownership also brought about some updated scientific libraries and optimized routines. Lots of happy folks here.

http://www.sgi.com/software/scsl.html
http://www.sgi.com/developers/devtools/languages/f ortran.html
http://www.sgi.com/developers/devtools/languages/a po.html
http://www.sgi.com/developers/devtools/languages/m ips73features.html

My university has two large SGI systems that crank away on compiled fortran code day and night. Our analog EE's, biowarfare research group, and meteorology folks keep both machines at about 95% load around the clock. One machine is a shiny new Origin 3000 (96x R14K/500) and the other is an Origin 2000 (64x R10K/250). The O2K has a stack of R14K/500 CPU nodeboards and an additional 64 GB ram ready to replace its aging R10Ks, but the users keep telling the admin staff to "wait another day, my big batch job is almost done".

The decision to switch from a Cray C90 to SGI had a lot to do with SGI's on-going fortran compiler development, optimization, and obscure/rare bug hunts. Their short term Cray R&D ownership also brought about some updated scientific libraries and optimized routines. Lots of happy folks here.

http://www.sgi.com/software/scsl.html
http://www.sgi.com/developers/devtools/languages/f ortran.html
http://www.sgi.com/developers/devtools/languages/a po.html
http://www.sgi.com/developers/devtools/languages/m ips73features.html

My university has two large SGI systems that crank away on compiled fortran code day and night. Our analog EE's, biowarfare research group, and meteorology folks keep both machines at about 95% load around the clock. One machine is a shiny new Origin 3000 (96x R14K/500) and the other is an Origin 2000 (64x R10K/250). The O2K has a stack of R14K/500 CPU nodeboards and an additional 64 GB ram ready to replace its aging R10Ks, but the users keep telling the admin staff to "wait another day, my big batch job is almost done".

The decision to switch from a Cray C90 to SGI had a lot to do with SGI's on-going fortran compiler development, optimization, and obscure/rare bug hunts. Their short term Cray R&D ownership also brought about some updated scientific libraries and optimized routines. Lots of happy folks here.

http://www.sgi.com/software/scsl.html
http://www.sgi.com/developers/devtools/languages/f ortran.html
http://www.sgi.com/developers/devtools/languages/a po.html
http://www.sgi.com/developers/devtools/languages/m ips73features.html

My university has two large SGI systems that crank away on compiled fortran code day and night. Our analog EE's, biowarfare research group, and meteorology folks keep both machines at about 95% load around the clock. One machine is a shiny new Origin 3000 (96x R14K/500) and the other is an Origin 2000 (64x R10K/250). The O2K has a stack of R14K/500 CPU nodeboards and an additional 64 GB ram ready to replace its aging R10Ks, but the users keep telling the admin staff to "wait another day, my big batch job is almost done".

The decision to switch from a Cray C90 to SGI had a lot to do with SGI's on-going fortran compiler development, optimization, and obscure/rare bug hunts. Their short term Cray R&D ownership also brought about some updated scientific libraries and optimized routines. Lots of happy folks here.

http://www.sgi.com/software/scsl.html
http://www.sgi.com/developers/devtools/languages/f ortran.html
http://www.sgi.com/developers/devtools/languages/a po.html
http://www.sgi.com/developers/devtools/languages/m ips73features.html

If I wanted that much resolution, I would want it on an SGI Reality Center. 15 foot screens and larger, now you're talking. :)

I think many use SGI Onyx systems for HDTV mastering and compositing work for movies. They have a bandwith of 11.2Gb/s for the entire system (at least the "smaller" Onyx 3200 variety) and have an HDTV I/O board that uses their XIO bus at 2.4Gb/s (also available for the Octane workstation). Check out this page. Regards / ushac

Didn't look very hard, did you? ;-)

(No, I don't know anything about it's goodness, but that link should tell you all you need to know about compatibility)

http://oss.sgi.com/projects/kdb/

Y'know... at first I didn't like the new "sgi" logo and wanted the cube back. But I'm starting to really like the new logo.

http://www.sgi.com/o2/images/hp_o2.jpg
http://www.arsc.edu/resources/hardware/images/Octa ne.jpg
VS.
http://www.reputable.com/sgipix/0.jpeg

Regardless of what other people think:

http://www.beyondboxes.net/sticker.jpg
http://www.arke.de/TC/sgi-homer.gif

Note that a lot of SGI graphics systems, such as the Onyx, actually resemble servers as much as they do workstations. SGI has created a third category in which to market these system: Visualization Systems. This is how SGI copes with their loss of the workstation market to cheap generic boxes. And it makes sense, since SGI still has an edge with it comes to massively parallel technology.

__

Note that a lot of SGI graphics systems, such as the Onyx, actually resemble servers as much as they do workstations. SGI has created a third category in which to market these system: Visualization Systems. This is how SGI copes with their loss of the workstation market to cheap generic boxes. And it makes sense, since SGI still has an edge with it comes to massively parallel technology.

__

...and it uses PC100 SDRAM! Maxing out the RAM shouldn't be too expensive.

But it comes with an "ATI Technologies® XPERT 2000 PROTM AGP adapter"! Arrgh.

Any idea on the pricing for the system?

(A thousand pardons for this possible offtopic troll, but, I could not resist the venue. It seemed relevent given some of the talk about the strength of SGI's sputtering revenue stream.)

Any word on if/when SGI's ZX10 could run Linux?

Marketing hint: I don't think I'm the only one that is dying to see a Linux desktop solution that took advantage of:

• low cost COTS x86 hardware
• rock solid, nonproprietary, free OS
• but with professional level hardware OpenGL video card.

We're looking to replace some aging RISC workstations with x86 hardware and Linux, but the last bullet is holding us back from the decision.

I use @home and my ping times between ~8o and 55836514768147533222218 milliseconds. Is this usual for @home to have such a high latency?

I haven't had any problems installing XFS. You probably went about it a different way than I did - I grabbed the XFS ISO image from SGI, then proceeded to do a new installation. I've been running redhat 7.1 w/ xfs since it came out, and haven't had any problems. The ISO images can be grabbed from:

ftp://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/download/Release-1. 0/iso

This isn't an option for those not running redhat, or those who don't want to bother with reinstalling, but using this method of installing XFS is extremely simple.

I saw the SGI 1600SW on display once. It was showing some full-screen 3d demo, and looked pretty damn good. I couldn't see any of the ghosting or other problems you get with the typical LCD monitor. There are quality LCD monitors out there, they just cost more.

• Get to know the night staff - I eat my lunch at about the time the janitors finish, so I usually sit around with them and talk for a while. I've heard some amazing stories
  
• Read manuals - check the tops of racks of equipment that outside people (like EMC) maintain. Sometimes they'll leave the manuals there.
  
• Read documentation - SGI and Apple have lots of cool reading, not to mention Other Places.
  
• Write throwaway code - They may own it, so just try things out. See how fast you can get a parallel matrix multiply to go when you spread it over all 16 or so of the processors of a nice beefy box.
  
• Automate things - write scripts to make life easier for everyone, and give yourself even more free time to worry about!
  
• Read good books - I've been catching up on my reading backlog.
  
• Check HR's web page to double check your benefits - I found a nice discount on books from fatbrain that I had missed.
  
• See if the zone where managers sit has better toilet paper in the bathrooms.
  

The state of the art in CGI is roughly as follows: in Toy Story, everything looked plastic...but that was OK, because all of the characters were supposed to be plastic. This goes not only for the surfaces, but the modeling and motion as well. Antz and Bug's Life improved on these quite a bit; still using the convenient exoskeleton to keep from having to animate much skin, but apart from more detail and more natural scenes (like the tree in Bug's Life), there were still some things lacking: good rendering of hair and fur, good surface textures, and realistic motion on some characters.

Stewart Little and Dinosaur began to push the state of the art; the creators of Stuart Little had to create not only realistic fur for the lead, but also cloth. In the process, they contributed to the power of Alias|Wavefront's Maya package (some of their hair/cloth code made it into Maya).

It is getting better, and Shrek illustrates this (as will Monsters, Inc.). Detail is incredible, surface textures are bright and realistic, and motion is getting better (some characters were smooth, others were lacking (a bit like the skipping motions used in Toy Story 2, in both the "When somebody loves you" bit and the airport)). Fur is looking pretty good, and hair is OK (it renders well, but despite how the various Chris Landreth Maya animations, including "The End" and Bingo have turned out, it doesn't blow in the wind much).

It is getting better, though. The faces on the humans were incredibly detailed, and there is a tremendous attention to detail, both in character animation and in the scenery. I greatly anticipate the (not-so-distant) future of this style of CGI animation.

I wish they had listed the software/hardware they used at the end (even just a kudos to SGI or Sun or somebody). It is nice to know what was used.

I think the OP meant that Linux is the youngest contestant. NT was released after Kernel 1.0, but development started well in the 80s.

> The Linux kernel is more than 10 years old and it still
> has a toy-VM, toy-filesystem(ext2fs) and toy-scheduler.

A toy compared to what? BSD? Commercial Unices?
Anyway, there is a lot of activity regarding the file system issue. reiserfs is part of the official kernel since 2.4.2. sgi released version 1.0 of their port of xfs port. And IBM is still working on jfs.

Hardware vendors have discovered that Linux can be used to outsource OS development.

--

the SGI 1450 Server as 16 procs
2733/16 = 170(TCP) per CPU

Um, the SGI's page for the 1450 states that it's only a 4-way machine.

That yields 683.25 TPC/CPU for Linux, versus 212.375 TPC/CPU for win2k on the Compaq hardware. In other words, Linux is more than three times faster according to my calculations.

One of us has our numbers wrong... I've got SGI's website to back mine up... Am I missing something here?

Regarding w2k datacenter, it only supports up to 32 CPUs. Anybody know of any shipping x86 hardware at that scale? Last I heard Unisys had the only box, to be resold by Compaq... Until Compaq backed out (don't mean to troll here, but conspiracies abound that MS pushed it that way in light of w2k dc's "shortcomings" - YMMV).

Microsoft has hired Al Gore as a consultant while they plan on having TPC recount the benchmarking process which they labeled as unfair.

"This is ludicrous, no way are those results in any way proof of anything more, and with a 52 billion dollar budget allocated to marketing we'll prove it." stated an anonymous Microsoft spokesperson.

According to an insider, MS is also planning on declaring war on SGI for not using their ZX-10 servers for the test. An SGI spokesperson simply states, "We tried to use the fucking server, but the shit just bluescreened before we even turned the son of bitch on, so we kicked it a few times and chucked that shitty OS for the benchmarking test. Look, in all fairness we tried, but until Microsoft gets their shit together, we're going to try to capitalize on using a free OS such as Linux. Our company isn't do so great anyways so Microsoft can take their licensing and shove it."

After conceding to SGI, Microsoft then contacted Mr. Gore in efforts to gain insight on what not to do when asking for a recount. "We called Al to see where he screwed up asking for a recount so we don't fall victim to the same outcomes. We then tried to have him sell XP licenses at Columbia, but he conceded when pushed too hard." stated the anonymous MS employee.

Stay tuned as things get ugly

AO -- removing the dot in dot com

According to Steve Lord, one of the XFS developers, current xfs from cvs has problems. (link to Steves post on linux-xfs) /jarek

This guy Dave (I forget his last name now), from sgi gave a presentation to the DC-LUG back in 1999 and talked about XFS and how sgi wanted to release it as GPL to become a core component of Linux. He also talked about the history of XFS and how they had to invent a new size prefix to describe how large a filesystem XFS could accomodate ("exo-byte" = 1024 Gb). XFS has been used by sgi for their MIPS and Cray machines ever since 1984, and now that sgi has donated it to the Linux community, I think we'd be remiss if we didn't welcome it with open arms.

But that's just MHO. ;)

You don't need graphics-card/linux-specific hacks. It was reported on OpenGL.org recently that nVidia added the functionality to OpenGL it's extensions system.

All we need now is the implementation of their extension in Mesa - if they're going to go to all the trouble of developing OpenGL extensions you'd expect nVidia to help there as well.

BSD licensed code has this problem, which is one of the reasons why the GPL exists.
It is interesting how sucessful GPL code has been in the software industry. There are many commercial linux distributions, which has helped the Linux community. Other companies that have traditionally been involved with closed-source, propietary software are now recognizing free software as a viable alternative.

SGI is involved with their XFS project, among other things. IBM is involved with many linux related projects. And is being an incredible influence in the community. BSD has not received anywhere near as much commercial attention, which I find interesting, considering that the BSD/MIT license is considerably more corporation friendly, by giving rights to "use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software".

The BSD license allows companies like Apple to use BSD code with little (if any) accountability to the open source community, which is why the GPL is more widely accepted by open source developers. But the question really becomes that of licensing. Apple has their APSL license, and IBM has their IPL license. A major difference between these two licenses is that the IPL is OSI approved. Apple's APSL is not.

Apple is using the phrase "open source" as a means of marketing. It's not right and I plan to ignore them until they clean up their act. Apple has used BSD code, and has not contributed to the BSD community. But the BSD community doesn't require this. So who is to blame? It's simple. If you do not want companies to exploit your work, don't let them. Use GPL licensing. That's what it's for.

Here:
http://linux-xfs.sgi.com/projects/xfs/faq.html

Here is the link. You can download the whole ISO image, burn it into a CD, boot the installer from it, then use the stock RH7.1 CDs to get a nice RH7.1-on-XFS ;-)
http://linux-xfs.sgi.com/projects/xfs/1.0_installe r.html

Just a little note. You seem to still be thinking in LISP/some other language, or you haven't learned new-style C++. If you want a pipe of some sort which calls a function to get a new element, you write an iterator. So, *x would give you the last thing read from the pipe and ++x would read one more thing from the pipe. Then you can use all the fun STL algorithms with it, like any other input iterator.

Take a look at the istream_iterator and ostream_iterator (one site is SGI's). If you don't know the STL look at the introduction and http://www.sgi.com/tech/stl/Iterators.html and http://www.sgi.com/tech/stl/InputIterator.html (sorry, too lazy to make them links, they're all on the site above)

The author of the paper missed this little point. You not only don't understand cool features, you also can't use the language well because you're using the wrong paradigm.

Please note that there are some gaps (spaces) in the middle of the two URLs I pasted. They need to be removed in order for the URL to play nice with your web browser.

SGI MIPS/IRIX Roadmap

The Mandate of Application Compatibility in SGI IRIX 6.5 (An excellent whitepaper on the goals and future of IRIX 6.5, written by an IRIX 6.5 engineer