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SGI Installs First Itanium Cluster At OSC
Troy Baer writes: "SGI and the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) have announced the installation of the first cluster using Itanium processors. The system consists of 73 SGI 750 nodes, each with two Itanium 733MHz procs and 4GB of memory, connected by Myrinet 2000 and Ethernet. Software includes Linux/ia64, SGI's ia64 compiler suite, MPICH/ch_gm, OpenPBS, and Maui Scheduler."
I know this is a rhetorical question, but having once spent a lot of time thinking about how to advise them before and during their fall, I'll give you my analysis. Some of this I saw at the time, some aspects I only saw too late. Learn from their mistakes.
Here's what went wrong:
- SGI succumbed to the Innovator's Dilemna. Unwilling to canibalize their high-end graphics, they refused to enter the PC 3D graphics space and left it open for 40+ hungry competitors. Many of their engineers left for said competitors when it was clear SGI was going nowhere. (Jim Clark recognized the dilemna in 1992-1994 by the way and jumped ship himself, a harbinger of things to come.) In fairness, its hard to canabalize a 1-2 billion dollar workstation graphics market in hopes of winning a 50-200 million dollar 3D PC graphics one.
- SGI refused to go to NT early on when they would have had leverage in making the move that could have forced/encouraged MS to adopt OpenGL exclusively for 3D. Instead, they said no to NT for too long, and when they said yes, it was a me-too decision that was later partially reversed in favor of Linux. Rather than recognizing and admitting they'd lost the war and pursuing the best possible terms, they chose, either conciously or through inaction, the "go down fighting, maybe we can still win" route.
- SGI's bread and butter midrange workstation 3D graphics was prone to "good enough" copying by competitors, Sun and HP. SGI's engineers spent a lot of time focusing on developing unique high-performance texture mapping serving 2% of their market (the entertainment sector) rather than on improving geometry engine performance further for the benefit of the biggest 40+% market (CAD).
- SGI's choice of a strategic response to PCs was poor: "We'll have highly differentiated systems" (the O2). Unfortunately, the differentiation (UMA, texture mapping, imaging, system bus architecture) was largely in areas that didn't add much value to their largest segments of customers. They built not what most of their customers wanted, but what the "cool" customers wanted. What most of their customers wanted was lower prices- that's what most of them ended up going to when dumping SGI.
- SGI engineers were late. Whether through lack of focus/discipline, resistance to "impossible" marketing schedules (that turned out to be necessary), choice of agressive cutting-edge/bleeding-edge component technologies that proved hard to debug, whatever. Your pick. Key products in the timeframe you mentioned were late, late, late. The midrange IMPACT graphics were announced June 95 as shipping but in reality didn't really ship for another 6 months, more or less. (In the meantime, Wall Street lost faith in the company as a momentum stock and SGI stock price dropped from its alltime high of 45 down to mid-20s.) Subsequent products also had a tendency of being late (O2, a year later than needed, Visual PC was late, etc.) SGI engineering exhibited a lack of discipline when instead they needed increased focus to adjust from product design cycles of 4 years (traditional workstation graphics) to 6 months (90s PC graphics). In their defense, this wouldn't have been easy. But at least some there knew about this. Which brings us to the last problem I'll go into.
- Arrogance. SGI was arrogant. No PC could beat us. We'll always stay ahead. Sun? HP? Ha! Yeah, we can do low-price graphics, look at Nintendo-64; see a PC beat that! etc, etc. Not everyone at SGI there was, but a heck of a lot were.
--LPP.S. I didn't even get into their server strategy, Cray, and later events. Another time perhaps.
This story:
h _s upercomputer_dc_1.html
/. anymore.
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010809/tc/tec
Has been out for all most *five* hours. The story talks about how Linux is going to be used as the OS for the *biggest* *cluster* *of* *super* *computers* *in* *history*
It is the greatest news I have heard in months and it "matters" if you ask me. The Super computer(s) will be funded by the National Science Foundation(NSF) and it is reported that the super computer(s) will be able to calculate in one second, what it would take a hand calculator ten millions years to calculate. In addition the total disk space will be enough to hold all most one and a half million full-length novels.
In other words, the Linux OS is going to be used for the largest computing grid in the history of the world.
This story has been availavle on Yahoo!(TM) LinuxToday, Newsforge etc for hours. I submitted the story 3 hours ago and nothing...
I used to read slashdot for the news and told myself I could ignore the mindless trolling and moronic comments, now I realize the news service is garbage and I have no reason to read
Looks like it is newsforge or LinuxToday for me
:-)
Pentium 4 has an absolutely pathetic floating point performance. Even Pentium 3 at 1000MHz outperforms Pentium 4 at 1500MHz on floating point. See here for example. Your claim that Pentium 4 can do 3 floating point operations per clock cycle is nothing more than pulling numbers out of your ass. (unless you can somehow substantiate your ridiculous claim).
The P4 looses to the Athlon simply by the reason that the compilers can not use the vector instructions properly.
AMD has never had code optimized for their CPUs. They have always fought an uphill battle. Yet they managed to beat the crap out of intel in absolute performance (price/performance they had for a long time). The whole compiler crap is a strawman's argument. AMD has 3Dnow instructions which nobody uses. If current software was optimized for AMD, P4 would look even more pathetic.
Why anyone would be an Itanium instead of a dual P4/Athlon beats me.
Uhhh, perhaps because there is no such thing as dual P4?
It has less on-chip cache than a Celeron (128kb total)!! Sure it's packaged with a lot of sram, but still.
I don't know how to break it to you, but 1) Celeron has exactly 128KB L2 cache, and 2) SRAM stands for Static RAM, which is used for cache (as opposed to Dynamic RAM, which is used for the main memory).
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
The person who submitted the story (Troy Baer) is also the admin of the beast.
To give credit where credit is due, the admin of that system is Doug Johnson, who has done an enormous amount of work to get this thing working. I'm just a user support guy who writes lots of documentation and happens to dabble in systems stuff like Maui and PVFS in my Copious Spare Time[tm].
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
Well sadly enough i can only agree with you.
I actually do not have any hope left for SGI. Here is why:
-Their workstations do not cover enough markets to sustain themseves let alone generate enough revenue to set them back ahead of the pack.
-Their single image clusters are not cost effective enough for the scientific comunity and their use for Visualisation, where people would be willing to pay the insane price, isn't large enough.
-Anybody can build UNIX servers.
-Anybody can build MPI clusters.
So I think they are reduced to niche markets which will not cover their cost in R&D which means they will have to license technology or buy components from others (CPUs, bussystems etc.). However they might run out of breath in the time they redesign their gear to take advantage of the new tech, and reduce the production cost.
So my guess is they will be consumed slowly by their competitors - lets only hope some of their tech remains.
--Ulrich
On no accounts allow a Vogon to read poetry at you
Prepare to lose all karma...
SGI sucks.
Most of their hardware is great, as is most of their software. But their head is completely up their ass these days.
Stagnant desktop machines. Impressive but overpriced big iron. OEM PCs. And a terrible logo. What went wrong? Where to begin??
Once upon a time there was a company called Silicon Graphics. They got their start by making wickedly powerful terminals to provide 2D and 3D graphical front end to massive minicomputers and supercomputers. Mind you this was two years before Apple introduced the Macintosh and Xerox was still playing with the underpowered Star. Shortly there after they began selling a line of large rackmount, standalone graphical computers that used multiple large boards covered with cpus, fast ram, and other goodies to churn out decent primitive 3D in real time using the GL framework (later called IRISgl, which eventually became OpenGL). This was about the time your dad upgraded from a C64 to a IBM XT.
Fast forward to 1995. You and I were probably playing with a Pentium 100 and looking forward to the rumored 3Dfx Voodoo card. In that same year, SGI upgraded their Onxy graphical supercomputers to InfinteReality graphics... providing performance on par with a Geforce 256. Except the IR could handle 64 MB of dedicated texture ram and 320 MB of frame buffer. Three IR "pipes" could be installed in a single system, and each pipe could even be broken down to multiple channels. IR allowed the world of graphical simulation to finally approach photorealistic quality with multiple projectors / monitors providing a wrap-around display (keep in mind that much of this was available on a limited scale 1991 with SGI's RealityEngine pipes). Both the Onyx and SGI's non graphical server, the Challenge, received a CPU upgrade. Up to 24 MIPS R10000 CPUs running at 195 MHz (each providing 390 MFLOPS + 390 MIPS) could be installed in the Onyx. The Challenge could take up to 36. SGI's flagship desktop machine, the Indigo2, received upgrades as well. The top of the line model had an R10K/195 CPU, up to 640 MB of interleaved ram, two channels of SCSI, and Maximum Impact graphics (4 MB of dedicated texture ram, 27 MB of framebuffer, and performance somewhere around that of the TNT2).
SGI's machines continued to get better. Indigo2 was replaced with the Octane. Onyx and Challenge were replaced with the Onyx2 and Origin, and later with the Onyx 3000 and Origin 3000.
Here we are in the middle of 2001. SiliconGraphics has become "sgi" with a NYSE stock price below $1. Their O2 desktop machine hasn't changed much since 1996, and aside from the new gfx card and faster CPUs, the Octane2 isn't a whole lot different than the original Octane in 1997. Onyx 3000 uses updated graphics based on the original IR from 1995. Perhaps the only noteworthy change has been the architecture of the new Onyx and Origin. Both can scale as a single machine to 512 CPUs with 1 Terabyte of RAM. Many of these massive machines can be clustered together for even more power... at an insane cost.
The company that brought us 3D on the desktop has pretty much come to a halt. Their desktop machines haven't change much in almost 5 years. Their big iron is impressive, but expensive as all hell. And their PCs... where to begin on the PCs... They tried making what could have been the coolest pair of PCs of all time. But due to delays and driver issues, the machines ended up being overpriced, nonupgradable ho-hum boxes. Pretty soon they hit the other end of the spectrum with generic OEM PCs. And now this, the "SGI 750" Itanium. A box that is identical to that which is being sold by HP and Dell. The only thing SGI about it is the logo. We're not even dealing with the same SGI. This new "sgi" couldn't have possibly come from the same roots as the old, grand, SiliconGraphics.
I can't help but wonder what the old SiliconGraphics would be doing today. Like another poster pointed out, the Octane would probably have an ever faster architecture, better graphics, and probably 4x the CPU power. This new linux cluster would probably be based on much better machines and using something better than Myrinet (which is limited by the 66MHz/64bit PCI bus the card sits in). The old SGI would have made a complete fire breather, not some OEM stack that anyone could build themselves. The old SGI would have the cube logo *and* rightfully wear it.
When I look inside my old, used Indigo2 from 1995 what do I see? I see its 750 watt power supply. I see not a graphics card, but *three* massive cards working together and connected to the power supply via a thick jumper cable. I see engineering at its best. I see a product that pushed the limits of silicon and interconnects. I see something that was worth its $50,000 pricetag. I see something that was indeed an order of magnitude more powerful than anything else on the desktop.
When I look at the current SGI desktop machines, I see something I can buy for less at Best Buy.
I recently saw a demonstration of the Onyx 3000. One of the demos was a visualization app used by an automobile maker. The app showed a few different cars in full detail across three screens (each 1280x1024) in a panoramic configuration at a sustained, locked 75 Hz + 75 FPS. The cars had complete reflection features that interacted right down to the metallic flecks in the paint. The detail was right down to the 3D textures that made up the subtle surface of the dash plastics and the seat leather. It was truly photorealistic. I've seen the Geforce 3 demos, they were nowhere near as impressive as the car demo.
Another demonstration showed the Onyx's power at loading textures. The machine they had was connected to several RAIDs containing over 500 GB of satellite and aerial photos. On the same three screens and in the same 75 Hz + 75 FPS were able to zoom down to a national park, pan across to another state, and zoom back out to planet Earth floating in space. All in real time. The RAIDs were clattering so loud I could hardly hear the man giving the demonstration. The Onyx never missed a beat.
If the old SGI was here today, we'd have that kind of power on the desktop. And it would cost $50,000 and consume 750 watts. Not $500,000 and 9,000 watts.
And we wouldn't have a Myrinet connected stack of Itanium PCs. We'd have something a whole hellofa lot better.
[end rant]
It took MS 15 years to have a full 32-bit OS
after those chips came out. Hope they are faster
this time. 32 bit NT on an Itanium would be a waste.
SGI and SUN have had full 64 bit OS for 7 & 5
years. Yes, there are bugs to shake out in the
beginning. OF course Bill & Steve will announce
they are "just about to ship" for years until
they do.