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Reliving The Glory Days of SGI
devin15 writes "Remember in the '90's when the tech boom was in full swing and SGI was the darling of the 3D graphics industry, whatever happened to those days? Wired is running an article about a group for whom the glory days of SGI have not yet gone. From the article:" If the Mac community is dwarfed by the Microsoft horde, the number of SGI users amounts to a rounding error.""
The whole 'UNIX workstation' market is gone.
Sun? SGI? HP? DEC?
Computers became powerful and inexpensive too fast. Clusters killed the big servers.
I find that inst, even in the newer releases of IRIX, makes installing an IRIX system a chore.
Using their latest release and overlays I still have dependencies that can not be met. It can be frustrating to anyone who is used to a sane installer, like the ones provided with Solaris, HP-UX and most Linux distros.
Filesystems were not recreated sometimes when I made the install, and configurations were left on the system. I'm not a Unix god, but that is not how most operating systems install, or how I think they should work.
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They're cool looking computers, but in the end that entire stack of SGIs shown in the fellow's home office probaby has about as much power as the Nvidia/AMD box sitting on my desktop.
:-)
A few years ago now, I had access to an old Silicon Graphics machine - a Indigo 2, or something like that. It was quite fun being able to mess around with what had originally been an incredibly expensive machine, and of playing with another UNIX I hadn't used. I even got Blender running on it...
Of course, the machine (well, IRIX) promptly killed itself, and nobody knew the equivalent of the BIOS password to allow reinstallation from the IRIX CDs and bootable SCSI CD-ROM drive we'd spent weeks hunting down. There turned out to be no way of resetting that password, at least not without wiping the MAC address too. Given that the machine was only useful as an X terminal and web browsing machine, it didn't seem worth doing.
Looking inside, at the multi-boarded graphics subsystem covered with huge custom-built chips, it seemed rather sad that even a bargain-basement PC of the time would have massively outperformed it. And now, when I run Half-Life 2 on my current, elderly PC, complete with all sorts of per-pixel shaders and suchlike thanks to its inconceivably powerful (yet obsolete) Geforce 4, I think about how impressed I'd been by a couple of gouraud-shaded polygons...
The only thing I really miss is the screensaver. I forget what it was called, there's an attempted simulation in Xscreensaver called 'stonerview' or similar, but it's nowhere near as good as the original.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
Back when SGI's best people split and left to form 3DLABS (or NVIDIA - Forget which. I am sure someone out there will point out that I could have looked it up, but I don't care - my point is still valid), the heads at SGI didn't want to sell just a Video Card. So all those talented people decided to leave and make globs of money (and my 6800 and I thank them!). SGI only wanted to sell their overly priced 100% solution. And by the time they did sell PCs, it was overpriced and way too late.
Atlas Shrugged : Thematic Story
SGI faced the innovator's dilemma big-time; it was tricky to cannabalize their $2 billion workstation business for a $300 million graphics card market. And to move from being a full-system vendor to being a graphics card vendor. And even with all the management and business-issue problems, I noticed three problems their engineering effortsg never overcame:
- trouble with quality and shipping on time (see IMPACT)
- couldn't match/switch from 3-4-year development cycles of the workstation business to 6-month product cycles of the PC graphics card business
- engineers were loath to give up control of the chipset/box/OS in order to settle for just controlling the graphics subsystem. They tried to be a full-system player in a PC world. Given that Compaq couldn't really do it (something that was at least semi-obvious at the time), its not a surprise they, coming from the workstation space, couldn't do it with their integrated NT workstations.
- The engineers were delivering product that was differentiated but not in the areas that the biggest customers cared the most about. The benefits of UMA (unified memory architecture) graphics just weren't in sync with what the market most wanted: the fastest 3D at the cheapest price. And in the classic workstation space, polygon-pushing was what was most needed. Half their business was CAD workstations and in the end they lost that to Sun/HP/IBM who didn't have the sexy texture mapping stuff but could render polygons "good enough".
SGI also benefitted from many years from the other workstation vendors under-investing in 3D graphics. When that era ended, even the workstation business they were in got a heck of a lot more competitive.
Anyway, that's what comes to mind when I remember back to SGI in the mid-90s. In hindsight, I don't know of any silver bullets that would have gotten them out of the situation; it was death by a thousand cuts. At the time, I wondered if a merger with Apple would have made sense but it wasn't clear that the disfunctionality of the two organizations at the time would have melded into something better. Maybe a damn good CEO could have helped them carve out a more defensible role in the industry; that's the only thing that got Apple through as far as I'm concerned.
There are still a very large number of situations where a "cluster" does not work. In some modeling and simulation area's they need a lot of CPU's on ONE OS image.. To make a blanket statement saying that clusters are the answer is either someone lacking experience or bias.. Before deciding what the solution is you have to figure out what you are trying to do..
In our shop we have many large SGI's (128CPU +), IBM Regatta's, Sunfire's, Linux Clusters, and Sun Clusters. They each solve the requirements for the task at hand. We have found that there are numerous areas' Linux is lacking, so for that on our infrastructure support servers we use Sun and HP.
But, here we have some graphically intense stuff we do and they have done all the tests on available x86, IA64, and MAC hardware out there and they just can't do what our current SGI's are doing.. Various vendors have thrown a lot of money in the studies to try and get a larger foothold over SGI.
I think they failed because they didn't sense the change in the PC market. Back in the early and up to mid 90's professional 3D graphics and visualization was synonimous with SGI. I worked for a company that developed one of the major CAD/CAE/CAM product and everyone on their desk had an SGI. If you were a co-op like me you had an older one, if you are the manager you had a R12000 one with 1Gb or ram. In the basement in the "vault" we had a quad R12000 with 4 Gb or ram to crunch huge matrices for CAE. Then around the year 2000 consumer 3D graphics cards and CPUs became more and more powerful and caught up with SGI's products. I could spend about $1000 and get a PC that was 3 times as fast as the SGI on my desk at work which was probably bought for $4000. SGI just couldn't stay ahead of the market and they never lowered the prices to make their machines competitive with PC. I still don't know many people who have or had an SGI at home, they were just too darn expensive.
Another thing is, after the tech bubble burst companies that before had plenty to spend all of the sudden had to cut corners, and one of the corners were the very expensive SGI workstations that could be replaced by Linux boxes or Windows PCs.
IRIX has a bad release back in the early/mid 90s and now it has a rap as being unsecure. In truth it's not that bad. You would not want to just connect a freshly installed system right to the internet though. By default many services are turned on, I suppose for the convenience of desktop users. Basically just chkconfig off what you don't need and go through the system manager/security and access contorl settings. You can find more detailed guides on hardening IRIX on nekochan and the groups.
I ran old SGI systems for a few years and really loved them. I was never really into the graphics stuff, because most of the software was way too expensive, and the cheap software (Blender) was incomprehensible. But I loved the machines and used them for web stuff. Sure, they were allegedly insecure, but you could tighten them up pretty easily, and nowadays all the breakins are automated exploits of commodity systems. So now I'd say a SGI is a lot more secure than the average system just because they have such a tiny market share.
I thought the operating system and GUI were really slickly designed at the time. They certainly had the most attractive implementation of virtual desktops I've ever seen. Linux has them, but not with the style SGI does and I have to admit that style wins points with me - especially when Linux was still lost in the world of horrible, unreadable fonts while SGI did a great job making them legible and attractive.
But then came Apple and MacOS X, which really showed the world what a truly slick Unix desktop could be like, and I switched almost immediately, leaving my Windows, SGI and Linux machines in the dust. After all, Apple could do it all in one slickly designed system.
I'm sorry SGI never took off; I think they could have been a nice consumer alternative if they could have figured out how to keep costs down. I tried to install Mozilla on my old Indigo2 about six months ago and I got bogged down in dependencies and quit, so it's just sitting in the corner.
People talk about proprietary systems being bad, and the future being in open systems and commodity hardware. And there are bad things about proprietary systems, but I love the spirit that created them, the desire to create something that was designed, not built out of tinkertoy blocks. The desire to create something where the operating system and hardware were built together in one seamless, coherent way.
Because of this, I shed a tear for the proprietary systems, built when men were men, women were women, and computers were something special instead of crudely-designed commodities.
Those days, of course, live on in the Apple world. Which, if you think of it, may be the best of both worlds - the price has been forced down by commodity machines, but it's still very much a sleek, designer experience.
Because after all, that's what I want a computer to be: Something special.
D
No, that's really the opposite of what happened. "Rocket Rick" Belluzzo saw the shift in the market, but he reacted to it in precisely the wrong way. Rather than trying to develop subversive technologies to undermine the PC market shift, Belluzzo decided to try to outsource SGI's workstation business, turning it into just another PC manufacturer.
Right now, companies like ILM are tearing out SGI workstations and replacing them with ultra-cheap desktops. They're taking advantage of the ability to work with low-resolution proxies in real time and then render jobs overnight on the big iron. That's a good workflow for that environment.
SGI should have been their first. They had the big iron --nobody has bigger iron, even now; SGI's supercomputers are more scalable than anybody's. They should have developed software frameworks that facilitate remote rendering of graphics operations. How? I don't know; I'm not a graphics expert. But they should have been first on that block. Then SGI could have gone to a company like ILM and said, "We'll sell you a thousand server processors and a thousand one-processor desktops for five million bucks."
Instead, SGI said, "Fuck the desktop. The server business will boom forever!" Which was a huge mistake.
SGI's failure is that they tried to adapt to the dominant paradigm instead of recognizing its limits and engineering ways to get around them. They reacted instead of created. And they lost vast sums of money in the process.
I write in my journal
What happended to SGI is an allegory for what has happened to America in general. Cheap mass-produced commodity junk has taken the profit out of the market, and forced everyone to lower their standards. Veyr much like the SouthPark episode "Something Wallmart this way comes." Ultimately we will all end up buying $100 dollar commodity computers, not because they are good or powerful, but because they will be all we can afford on our $10/hr jobs as janitors of the Microsoft plumbing.
I've thought about this, and I've come to the conclusion that we all choose this future each and every day. We all want stuff cheaper and we vote with our pocket-books. Mostly it works out for the better. In the days when SGI were so great, nobody I knew had one, even at work.In those days I worked on military command and control systems. 3d graphics would have been great, but it was just out of the question. 24-bit colour was a big deal as I remember.
Anyway, as excited as we all were by 3d screenshots in Byte and glowing testimonials about how the SGI machine under test could rotate and light and display the model in real time, the best time ever to be an OpenGL programmer is right now - nowadays almost all professional windows users have a machine that can run lightweight 3d displays even in software rendering, and if your app is smart enough to check for acceleration and use it if present, the things that can be done are out of this world.
Not just in the lab or in a CAVE, but actually out there on hundreds of thousands, or millions of PCs. Nvidia and ATI are where it's at (no matter how much of it was invented elsewhere) and I'm glad. Those $100 computers probably will be quite powerful, compated to the bulk of the history of computing. Hell, even if PCs were free with your cornflakes, there would still be money to be made selling services that are accessed via PC. All IMHO of course.
"I'm not a graphics expert."
Probably the only thing I agree with in this post but it didn't stop you from pretending like you knew what you were talking about.
""Rocket Rick" Belluzzo saw the shift in the market, but he reacted to it in precisely the wrong way."
Actually Jim Clark saw the same shift coming long before Beluzzo got there. He knew the PC was going to cream SGI on the desktop and he was telling everyone at SGI that, they didn't want to hear it, they drove Clark out and he made a fortune on Netscape, the Internet and the PC.
The writing was on the wall for the SGI desktop the day the Pentium Pro, Windows NT and Glint/Voodoo graphics arrived running Softimage(owned by Microsoft at the time). If they wanted to stay in the graphics market they needed to jump to developing single chip GPU's and mass producing them like 3Dlabs, 3dfx, Nvidia and ATI did. They also needed to dump MIPS for IA32. Unfortunately SGI was clinging to a proprietary OS, CPU, and especially sprawling multi card graphics systems that took a long time to develop, were very expensive, not very reliable and quickly got buried by GPU's which had everything on a chip, were faster, cheap when mass produced, revved much faster and were more reliable. SGI was asleep at the wheel, they didn't make that shift, most of their graphics talent saw it and left and ended up at the companies that did. SGI bet the workstation farm on video processing, which is why the O2 and Octante are like they are, and completely lost the market for people who want fast CPU's and to draw lots of polygons fast which is most of the workstation market.
At this same time SGI started chasing the supercomputing market and that isn't a market that is going to support the high growth and high profitability SGI knew in its glory days.
And then of course Belluzzo tried to build a PC. The problem with playing in the PC market is no one makes money at it except Intel and Microsoft. Everyone else is on razor thin margins and only make a profit with huge volume and ruthless cost cutting. It simply wasn't a market SGI had any chance of winning in. Only chance they had on the desktop was to follow the Apple model and Apple's desktop model hasn't really ever been a break through success.
"Right now, companies like ILM are tearing out SGI workstations and replacing them with ultra-cheap desktops. They're taking advantage of the ability to work with low-resolution proxies in real time and then render jobs overnight on the big iron. That's a good workflow for that environment."
SGI is throwing out their SGI's because they fell dismally behind the curves, the price curve, the performance curve and the price/performance curve. I doubt ILM's work flow is changing in the transition, other than their machines are just a lot faster and they can draw more polygons, so I have no clue why you are rambling about low res proxies and rendering on big iron.
SGI's big iron is really badly suited for rendering. Its geared to supercomputing and applications that need lots of processors working on a shared memory image. Rendering works best on lots of cheap little boxes with a CPU, some RAM and a very fast network. Cheap rack mount PC's running Linux are a perfect fit. SGI's and IRIX are not. Again SGI has no chance of being a player in this market today.
I'm amazed its taken the big studios as long as it has to throw out SGI though the big studios had to wait for Linux/OSX to mature because most big studio pipelines and expertise are completely wedded to Unix. Windows was never a viable option outside of little niches or smaller studios.
I wager the Star War's prequels and much of ILM's recent efforts are as bad as they are partially because their artists were tied to boat anchor O2's and Octanes which are completely dusted by a PC and an Nvidia graphics card at a fraction the price and have been for years. They had to use low end standins on the SGI's just because the graphics and CPU performance on SGI's
@de_machina