Experiences When Transitioning to Low-End Workstations?

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?"

Comments

Linux will be faster

[Atrapose]

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!

Know your requirements and eval based on them

[lcarstensen]

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.