Id Auctioning Off SGI That Created Q2 And Q3A

shiwala writes: "id software is auctioning the SGI Origin 2000 used to process all of the map data for Quake II and Quake III Arena." Hemos and I have been debating auctioning off the case that was the 2nd Slashdot (for a six months). I've been trying to find the alpha that was Slashdot for the first 9 months of its life (it served the first million pages: if I only knew that we would serve that many pages every day). Probably donate the $ to the FSF or Project Gutenberg or something. Anyway this id box amuses me: opening bid is $7500.

Comments

Well, why not?

[Chairboy]

I would like to announce the auctioning of the first computer I ever used to chat in an adult IRC chat room. It's a Mac 512ke that works fine, but the keyboard is a bit... sticky.

Back on topic....

Could the Auction will become the defacto engine behind the new economy?

In a way, we'd come full circle. In the beginning, purchases were bartered for. Two people would negotiate back and forth until the price was agreed on. Eventually, fixed prices started to replace this. Money became the accepted tender, and everyone was happy.

Now, however, it's becoming easy to do the bartering without the social interaction, bluffing, etc. Stores could set an opening bid on the things they wanted to sell. When demand went up, the prices would go up, but not because they raised prices, instead because customers would bid against each other.

Eventually, people might bid against each other from whatever evolves from web-enabled cell phones or bluetooth devices. The winner would get the goods right then, and the loser would need to wander around the store waiting for the next bidding cycle to start on that item. On the plus side, the customer might be able to snake great bargains if they come in at off peak hours, reducing the mob scene you find in stores between 5-7PM. People who needed to shop at peak hours would pay for the convenience, bidding against other people of like-mind.

Whole new services might even appear where people pay fixed fees to 'professional bidders' who would take care of the whole bidding process for them. This would appeal to people who just want to buy stuff, and would create a whole new career.

Maybe it's our destiny to go back to our roots, economically...

It's a supercomputer that's why!

[theHippo]

Even if Id isn't the one auctioning it, it still is news! I'm surprise to see an Origin2000 being auctioned! This is a very expensive piece of equipment and actually is a shared memory supercomputer, even to today's standard...you may have to add more processors though. Although per-processor wise it is not as fast as the current fastest PIIIs, this is a fine grained shared memory machine, unlike Beowulf clusters which have a distributed memory coarse grained architecture. At 200 Mhz per R10k, it still has got a lot of life in it...look at the Top 500 site for more info. Also the R10000 are 64-bit processors, and SGI's compilers does take advantage of this fact so if you need higher-accuracy computation than this is the way to go. I predict that this system will go for at least 100k+ considering the prices the prices that the four-processor little brother O200 systems are going for at the moment.

According to the 1998 review of a Sun Enterprise 10000 at UnixReview (previously Performance Computing)

Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) has published results for its Origin2000, a cache-coherent Non-Uniform Memory Architecture (ccNUMA) system, of 9,478 for SPECfp_rate95 and 5,922 for SPECint_rate95, both for system configurations with 64 195MHz Mips R10000 CPUs. The SGI floating-point score was on a system with 16GB RAM, while the integer score was obtained on a system with 48GB RAM. The SGI machine's floating-point performance is significantly higher than Sun's, while the Origin2000's integer performance is only slightly higher than the Starfire's. Additionally, SGI issued a press release on Feb. 25, 1998 announcing SPECrate scores for its latest 250MHz Mips R10000 CPU of 11,984 for SPECfp_rate95 and 8,021 for SPECint_rate95. At review time, however, those results had not yet been posted on the SPEC Web site, so configuration details of the test systems were not available.

Re:Things to consider when buying

[Stephen Samuel]

Actually, it probably uses a 30A plug -- 20A if you're lucky. Even at 30A, you could rewire a clothes dryer or oven circuit to power it. Better yet, though -- just ask any decent electrician to run a new circuit for you.

With half the processors dead, chances are that you could pull the dead boards and coax it to run on a 15A circuit (as long as you didn't have much/anything else on the circuit) Kitchen counter plugs are a good bet, since most building codes require each plug to be on a separate circuit.

The heat issue is real, though. I worked with an SGI crimson once, in a small room with not enough air conditioning to handle the output of the thing. At night we had to close the door to the room, and the temperature would consistently hit ~35C (~95F) (this was in Vancouver, not Phoenix). One night it got so hot that a termal protection fuse blew. It stumped the SGI service guy for a while (he didn't know about the thermal fuse).

Due to bureaucratic heel-dragging, it took almsost 6 months to upgrade the air conditioning in the room.

I don't know why it's power requirements would stop you from using it in a residential neighbourhoood, but chancces are that it's only FCC 15B (industrial) rated. -- I mean, who's going to put an Onyx in their basement?? (OK, put your hand down, I take that back!)