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Experiences When Transitioning to Low-End Workstations?

Posted by Cliff on from the cutting-costs-by-cutting-the-heavy-iron dept.

gerddie asks: "Lately, we have seen a lot of companies starting to move their graphics stuff from high end to low end linux workstations (e.g. Dreamworks). Of course one reason to do such thing is cut costs, and therefore, at our institute we are going to replace or aging SGI O2s with Linux workstations. I wonder if you have experience with such a transition - especially regarding the usability of such machines for (scientific) visualization? What is working well, and where did you encounter pitfalls?"

6 of 60 comments (clear)

  1. Linux will be faster by Atrapose · · Score: 5, Informative

    SGI O2's run on a shared memeory idea. This format makes graphics on O2's quick because the common operation of sending data from what would be main memory to what would be texture / video memory on a PC extremely quick. Instead of having to travel through a latency timer and a PCI or AGP bus, the memory is just copied or a far jump send to the video controllers.

    However... With as fast as linux boxes are now, and as old as O2's are, I think you'll see a performace increase on the Linux side. I suggest you run a non-free windowing system instead of XFree86 (you'll find there are some commercial X-es out there that benchmark dramatically faster than XFree), and do a little streamlining of your kernel before putting the boxes live.

    Ta!

  2. O2s to Linux by Outland+Traveller · · Score: 3, Informative

    Well, if you did what we did and transition your SGI 02 R10-12ks to 2+Ghz PCs w/ a good quality graphics card, you can expect to see 5-10x the rendering performance at 1/3rd of the price.

    If you're used to SGI's extremely high quality "no bullshit" service department you might be in for a rude surprise, however. Even the very high end Dell service plans will only get you someone who goes on site for 30mins to change a component. They neither have the willingness nor the ability to diagnose symptoms, and none of them know ANYTHING about Linux.

    This can cause you a lot of pain and suffering if you have difficult-to-localize hardware issues in a demanding environment. My advice would be to either keep your own inventory for severe support scenarios, or go with a system vendor that provides a much higher quality level of field service than Dell's "partners".

  3. There are some issues with Nvidia's OpenGL support by shocking · · Score: 4, Informative

    While Nvidia's OpenGL is pretty good, there are a few obscure corners used by our seismic applications that they don't seem to support. In particular, the facility to use colour indexed textures is not supported in their current driver. It was supported in the earlier drivers, but there's not support for the later cards and a bunch of other bugs to cope with as well. It just means 4 times the texture usage or using vertex programs for the same effect, but not all high end hardware appears to support the vertex stuff. From what we can tell ATI has their own set of problems. Sigh.

  4. I am doing this right now... by floydman · · Score: 4, Informative

    Well , i am in the middle of the project right now, and it was a hard way. We had simulation packages tunning on SC nodes, and that have been converted to linux. The visualization and data extraction tools are currently being migrated to linux too(from AIX, SGI and and Solaris 8). We are using UNIRAS graphics librarybya avs.
    Problems you are going to meet are:

    1) Big/Little endian issue, and this is one of the worst problems u will meet in your life :).

    2) There are minor code changes that you are going to do, concerning memory allocation.

    3) Ofcorse you will have to take care of large file support. :) (that one was fun)..

    Well, thats what i can remeber at the moment.. /*Why is there a penguin on my desktop?!*/

    --
    The lunatic is in my head
  5. Some useful comments here, but... by kiwimate · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...wouldn't it be rather a good idea to try out a couple of the proposed new workstations in a, you know, pilot programme? For the cost of a couple of boxes, a couple of licenses of the software you're interested in, and the hours to set it all up, you'll be able to set up these PCs in an area where some of your people can try running their visualizations on them and see how it works out.

    From the post:

    I wonder if you have experience with such a transition - especially regarding the usability of such machines for (scientific) visualization?

    Not to take anything away from the posters (many of whom are making comments from obvious experience -- e.g. the comments about the different architectures (big-endian vs. little-endian), but usability is, after all, in the eye of the beholder.

    One other point (and please note I am not familiar with much outside of FEA type packages) is the software you're using -- does it have a Linux platform support, or are you contemplating making an application switch as well? If so, be prepared for some resistance from the users who will be used to how things work in their big and complex package, and will not want to learn a different big and complex package.

  6. Know your requirements and eval based on them by lcarstensen · · Score: 5, Informative
    Speaking as someone from Dreamworks, I can tell you that it works incredibly well for us. But that's all I can say - you have to be able to figure out what the best platform is for your needs based on your own criteria, which should probably include:
    • ISV support. You should ask your ISV's how well their products work and how well they are supported. You should ask them what hardware and distributions they use to QA their applications.
    • Development environment for in-house code. GNU C++, STL compliance, and ATI/NVIDIA OpenGL support is pretty much just catching up to and is now ready to surpass SGI's support now. Java support has been far superior on Linux for years. What do you write your apps in?
    • IHV support. We picked a hardware vendor that had UNIX graphics desktop experience and was actively applying that experience to Linux. They pick supportable graphics cards and spend lots of time qualifying drivers for customer environments. You too can then ask them for help in working through the inevitable graphics and desktop bugs. There aren't many IHV's that can offer this.

    Absolutely, positively have multiple vendors come in with their graphics workstations and then proceed to evaluate how well your critical applications can run. Expect this process to take months.

    Finally, I'm not sure how large and mature your present environment is, but if you're talking about more than a few seats and two or three apps, expect a transition that takes a long time. Let people run their O2's next to their Linux boxes. Eventually, if you give the Linux systems proper care and feeding, you'll see dust start to collect on the O2's. Then, and only then, have you successfully completed your transition.