Re:Strict Guidelines only way to cope with load
on
Dorm Storm?
·
· Score: 2
I mean, listen to yourself! You required users to buy your NIC (at $50?!?), use only the operating systems that
you allowed (I still haven't figured out what you're preventing by not allowing Linux as a client OS, aside
from happy users), you misused the concept of DHCP, and you completely violated any standards of
academic opennes and integrity. Your network sounds not like a success, but a disaster!
Me? I was a student there. Not an admin. Not an assistant. I was just a student. I didn't agree with their policies either, *BUT* things did work out quite well. All in all, I have no complaints. It was a tradeoff, but a good and fair one.
Strict Guidelines only way to cope with load
on
Dorm Storm?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
At the university I recently graduated from, dorm dwellers had to meet strict guidelines to connect their computers to the LAN. It was a bit of a pain at first, but the years went very smoothly.
Each dorm room was configured for two residents, and thus had two phone jacks and two switched 10/100BT ethernet drops.
The guidelines were as follows:
Windows only (Win95/98/ME/NT4/2K)
Desktops *had* to use a campus-provided (free) 3Com NIC
Laptops *had* to use a campus-provided 3Com PCMCIA/Cardbus NIC (not free, but only $50)
The NICs were distributed with the MAC addresses already recorded and configured into the DHCP servers. Thus, the user always got the same IP address.
"Academic file sharing" (windows file sharing not requiring a password) was welcome. Warez was not. Napster, etc were blocked, but all outgoing requests were logged and investgations were made.
NICs had to be plugged directly into the wall jacks, no hubs, switches, or routers. The LAN level switches monitored MAC addresses to enforce this.
EVERYTHING was logged at the switch and router levels. Violators *were* contacted, warned, and often expelled.
Harsh, perhaps. But I can't recall a single problem aside from a few intial NIC driver issues (which 3Com and the university were able to resolve quite quickly). Verbose, step-by-step installation procedures with screenshots for every modern version of Windows were included with the NIC. Free installation and setup was also available.
Thankfully, the rest of the university was a pleasent blend of Windows, MacOS, Linux, and commerical Unix. "Housing and Dining" was the only department with the Windows and our NIC only policy.
Had I not lived through it, I would probably bash and complain about such strict regulations. But, hey, it worked. Bandwidth was plentiful and the LAN was always up.
WTF? Were they all made in Taiwan?? Are the russian shuttle parts interchanageable with the american shuttle parts? Do other countries have these as well??
The 6th fastest (reported) supercomputer on that list is ASCI Blue Mountain (a cluster of 48 SGI Origin 2000's). It's pretty interesting to note the installation date of that machine... 1998!
A lot has happined since then (just think, in 1998 the fastest x86 CPU was the Pentium II at 450 MHz). If you look further down the list, the next oldest machine is a Cray at number 35. Very cool that Blue Mountain is still a pretty impressive performer over three years later (an eternity by computer terms).
I ran across a few more... too bad the thing is so goofy looking (though, I have to admit, the old cube logo and Origin name is much cooler than the new "sgi 2800" name and logo).
If your app requires lots of vector crunching, the SV1 is one hellofa machine that'll keep you more than happy. The specs (mentioned above) are staggering... up to 1 TB of RAM, up to 1229 CPUs, air and/or water cooled.
However, it's not alone. There are some other pretty mighty machines out there. The NEC SX-5 has faster RAM and more powerful vector CPUs than the SV1, but does not scale as large. The SGI Origin 3000 series is not vector, but rather a of (somewhat) traditional CPU design. It's available with up to 512 CPUs and 1 TB of RAM. Unlike both the SV1 and SX-5, the Origin can be ordered with graphics (which turns it into an Onyx).
Then, there's the upcoming Cray SV2, which will be a combination of massive parallel & vector processing. Up to several thousand CPUs and a staggering RAM thruput of 250 GB/sec per bank!! (The Origin 3000 mentioned above has a total system bandwidth of 716 GB/sec.... but that's the entire machine. The SV2 will have more than that with just three banks of RAM alone).
Some of these machines are single image systems (in the case of the Origin 3000, SX-5 and >33 CPU SV1)... meaning they are one single machine, not a cluster. Most run very specific OSes made just for their hardware, with the possible exception of the Origin. SGI's big Origin and Onyx 3000 machines run IRIX 6.5, the same OS that runs on a $150 e-bay special SGI Indy workstation. Kinda cool. The compilers and math libraries are also heavily tuned and generally come with lots of example code and performance tips. When my university purchased a 96 CPU Origin 2000 a few years ago, SGI included a *box* of binders and CDs from some past performance computing seminars they had held. Our university still holds a support contract for the Origin, and thus we're still getting significant compiler and library updates.
Sort of belittles dual bank PC2600 DDR-SDRAM (2x 2.6 Gigabyte/sec = 5.2 Gigabyte/sec) and Myrinet (1 Gigabit/sec = 125 Megabyte/sec interconnect), doesn't it.
Of course... a 16 node x86 cluster doesn't cost $500K - $50M either...
Hmm, PCI and no XIO? Would be nice to at least have a couple of each. Though 2 rack units isn't much room to work with. Wonder which version of IRIX it'll run? 6.5.13 + patches? 6.5.14?
You're thinking of "Rocket" Rick Belluzzo, former CEO of SGI. He was responsible for putting MIPS/IRIX on hold, courting the Wintel crowd, and the "sgi" logo. He successfully put SGI in a steep nosedive they'll probably never recover from.
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.
Slashdot is *still* using the old cube logo, rather than the new "sgi" logo. Sure the new logo sucks and the old logo is quite cool, but it's time to move on. The old days are long gone. Like the rest of the 'new' SGI, there is nothing special about the SGI 750 Itanium box, it's the same box with the same Intel reference board that HP, Dell, and others are selling.
SiliconGraphics has left the building. The "hip new" SGI is here. Quit using the old logo, it reflects a much cooler company that no longer exists.
My G4 / How many FPS do you want?
on
Case Tweaking
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
My machine at work is an older G4/533... (533 MHz PowerPC 7410, 512 MB of CAS-3 [slower] PC133 SDRAM, and the stock OEM nVIDIA GeForce2 MX). While 95% of my time (ok, 85%, but don't tell my boss) is spent in Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, and Cleaner 5, I have installed and played with some of the latest wizbang games. Quake 3, FAKK2, DeusEx, and UT all play very smoothly. "Timedemo" benchmarks show numbers in the 50 - 75 frame-per-second area. Just how much better does a game player need? I would imagine that the GeForce 3 gives even better performance, as well as the CPU improvements in the current G4s (733, 800, and 867 MHz PowerPC 7450). And who doesn't replace the stock mouse with a real one? Just like I did with my old Dell, the first thing I did was buy a nice 3 button scroll-wheel mouse. Works great in Mac OS 9.1 and OS X.
Sure the Mac is no gamer's dream, but it plays games as well as I would ever want. Plus it's a great workhorse.
Aside from the P233MMX machine I bought for $150 in 1998, I haven't made a better purchase choice than the new (white) Apple iBook. It's small, it's light, it's fast, and the battery lasts a good 4 hours. Though perhaps my favorite feature is the keyboard... the keys are full size and have normal spacing, and the travel is decent. Best laptop keyboard I've ever used. Mac OS 9.1 works great, OS X is coming along nicely, and YellowDog Linux works like a charm -- even has zippy fast XFree86 acceleration via the RageMobility128 right out of the box.
Get an iBook, you won't be sorry. (Now if only the 3 year extended warranty was cheaper...)
... is that X+1.0 will be around the corner! RedHat 8.0 probably won't be 100% stable, but it should be a cool new bit of software! I'll be installing 7.2 beta tonight, but what I'm really looking forward to will be the schweeet Red Hat 8.0 later this year!
gcc 3.0 has been out for a long time already and there's no reason not to use it. 2.95 and the unoffical 2.96x are ancient by today's standards. 3.0 is the latest version and it works quite well. A bit faster, too.
This is really cool, I love open betas! Great way to try some newer versions of kde and gnome!
Most of my machines are running (patched) 7.1, but I do have a few still on 7.0. I'm really looking forward to 7.2 final, but I'll sure use the beta right away. One of my friends is still using 6.2, heh.
SGI have to be careful because the maya release on macOS X means that alot of artists will move to the mac and ditch the
SGI's UNLESS SGI can ship a decent LINUX model
Ahh, but remember, SGI owns Alias|Wavefront (the company that makes Maya). There is a very good possibility that SGI may bring A|W back into SGI and become a software-only company.
That's the cube I want, and it should be out within a couple years. PS3 is nice. Game Cube is neat. But I'm willing to wait another two years for the hardware (and games) to look like they're straight out of Shrek or the FF movie.
I assumed they'd use a buttload of SGI systems like Pixar does.
Pixar, like Square, uses SGIs for the initial modeling and animation. They also use SGIs for the final (post-render) compositing. Neither Pixar nor Square use SGIs for rendering, though. Square used a huge Linux farm and Pixar uses a huge Sun farm.
The renderfarm consists primarily of ~1000
Linux machines (PIII, custom-built, rack mounted), running Red Hat 6.2. These machines do all the RenderMan renders, as well as
a number of other tasks.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, listen to yourself! You required users to buy your NIC (at $50?!?), use only the operating systems that you allowed (I still haven't figured out what you're preventing by not allowing Linux as a client OS, aside from happy users), you misused the concept of DHCP, and you completely violated any standards of academic opennes and integrity. Your network sounds not like a success, but a disaster!
Me? I was a student there. Not an admin. Not an assistant. I was just a student. I didn't agree with their policies either, *BUT* things did work out quite well. All in all, I have no complaints. It was a tradeoff, but a good and fair one.
Each dorm room was configured for two residents, and thus had two phone jacks and two switched 10/100BT ethernet drops.
The guidelines were as follows:
- Windows only (Win95/98/ME/NT4/2K)
- Desktops *had* to use a campus-provided (free) 3Com NIC
- Laptops *had* to use a campus-provided 3Com PCMCIA/Cardbus NIC (not free, but only $50)
- The NICs were distributed with the MAC addresses already recorded and configured into the DHCP servers. Thus, the user always got the same IP address.
- "Academic file sharing" (windows file sharing not requiring a password) was welcome. Warez was not. Napster, etc were blocked, but all outgoing requests were logged and investgations were made.
- NICs had to be plugged directly into the wall jacks, no hubs, switches, or routers. The LAN level switches monitored MAC addresses to enforce this.
- EVERYTHING was logged at the switch and router levels. Violators *were* contacted, warned, and often expelled.
Harsh, perhaps. But I can't recall a single problem aside from a few intial NIC driver issues (which 3Com and the university were able to resolve quite quickly). Verbose, step-by-step installation procedures with screenshots for every modern version of Windows were included with the NIC. Free installation and setup was also available.Thankfully, the rest of the university was a pleasent blend of Windows, MacOS, Linux, and commerical Unix. "Housing and Dining" was the only department with the Windows and our NIC only policy.
Had I not lived through it, I would probably bash and complain about such strict regulations. But, hey, it worked. Bandwidth was plentiful and the LAN was always up.
I knew the former soviet union had space shuttles, but I had no idea they looked so much like those from the USA!
http://www.buran.ru/htm/mtkkmain.htm
WTF? Were they all made in Taiwan?? Are the russian shuttle parts interchanageable with the american shuttle parts? Do other countries have these as well??
The 6th fastest (reported) supercomputer on that list is ASCI Blue Mountain (a cluster of 48 SGI Origin 2000's). It's pretty interesting to note the installation date of that machine... 1998!
A lot has happined since then (just think, in 1998 the fastest x86 CPU was the Pentium II at 450 MHz). If you look further down the list, the next oldest machine is a Cray at number 35. Very cool that Blue Mountain is still a pretty impressive performer over three years later (an eternity by computer terms).
I ran across a few more... too bad the thing is so goofy looking (though, I have to admit, the old cube logo and Origin name is much cooler than the new "sgi 2800" name and logo).
r igin2000.JPG
r igin2000Moniter.JPG
(Two *big* Origin 2000s)
http://w3.physics.uiuc.edu/~wilkens/Images/NCSA/O
(The neat O2K LCD... too bad O3K doesn't have that)
http://w3.physics.uiuc.edu/~wilkens/Images/NCSA/O
(The O2K "boxes")
http://www.unite.nl/nieuws/algemeen/levering.html
Most sexy belongs to the Thinking Machines CM-5 "Blinking Machines":
g es/CM5_lg.jpg
_ mountain.jpg
(Nice big CM5)
http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Cyberia/MetaComp/Ima
Makes the SGI Origins (see below) look like freakshows:
(128 CPU Origin 2000)
http://gepard.cyf-kr.edu.pl/GRIZZLY/or2.jpg
(A cluster of [many] 128 CPU O2K's)
http://www.ccic.gov/pubs/blue00/local_images/blue
(A 256 CPU O3K, a 16 CPU O2K, and some RAIDs)
http://www.cines.fr/images/IRISetMINERVE2.jpg
If your app requires lots of vector crunching, the SV1 is one hellofa machine that'll keep you more than happy. The specs (mentioned above) are staggering... up to 1 TB of RAM, up to 1229 CPUs, air and/or water cooled.
However, it's not alone. There are some other pretty mighty machines out there. The NEC SX-5 has faster RAM and more powerful vector CPUs than the SV1, but does not scale as large. The SGI Origin 3000 series is not vector, but rather a of (somewhat) traditional CPU design. It's available with up to 512 CPUs and 1 TB of RAM. Unlike both the SV1 and SX-5, the Origin can be ordered with graphics (which turns it into an Onyx).
Then, there's the upcoming Cray SV2, which will be a combination of massive parallel & vector processing. Up to several thousand CPUs and a staggering RAM thruput of 250 GB/sec per bank!! (The Origin 3000 mentioned above has a total system bandwidth of 716 GB/sec.... but that's the entire machine. The SV2 will have more than that with just three banks of RAM alone).
Some of these machines are single image systems (in the case of the Origin 3000, SX-5 and >33 CPU SV1)... meaning they are one single machine, not a cluster. Most run very specific OSes made just for their hardware, with the possible exception of the Origin. SGI's big Origin and Onyx 3000 machines run IRIX 6.5, the same OS that runs on a $150 e-bay special SGI Indy workstation. Kinda cool. The compilers and math libraries are also heavily tuned and generally come with lots of example code and performance tips. When my university purchased a 96 CPU Origin 2000 a few years ago, SGI included a *box* of binders and CDs from some past performance computing seminars they had held. Our university still holds a support contract for the Origin, and thus we're still getting significant compiler and library updates.
Sort of belittles dual bank PC2600 DDR-SDRAM (2x 2.6 Gigabyte/sec = 5.2 Gigabyte/sec) and Myrinet (1 Gigabit/sec = 125 Megabyte/sec interconnect), doesn't it.
Of course... a 16 node x86 cluster doesn't cost $500K - $50M either...
He gets to play with Linux/SGI clusters now, I'm stuck with Alphas & an O2000 in a back room somewhere.
You can come admin these clusters and I'll go work with your Alphas and Origin 2000.
Hmm, PCI and no XIO? Would be nice to at least have a couple of each. Though 2 rack units isn't much room to work with. Wonder which version of IRIX it'll run? 6.5.13 + patches? 6.5.14?
give me a 4D/35, IRIX 4.05 on tape, and leave me alone
http://www.overclockershideout.com/customer/MTP/
Overclocker kiddies will do anything for an extra 8 frames-per-second.
Now here's a scary thought... how about the overclockers team up with cluster builders??
You're thinking of "Rocket" Rick Belluzzo, former CEO of SGI. He was responsible for putting MIPS/IRIX on hold, courting the Wintel crowd, and the "sgi" logo. He successfully put SGI in a steep nosedive they'll probably never recover from.
d efault.asp
Where is Mr. Belluzzo today?
Hold on to your hat...
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/belluzzo/
imprecise exceptions
IA64 has pretty clean and easy asm, but debugging is a complete nightmare. It's certainly better than x86, but give me MIPS64 or MIPS R1X000 any day.
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]
Slashdot is *still* using the old cube logo, rather than the new "sgi" logo. Sure the new logo sucks and the old logo is quite cool, but it's time to move on. The old days are long gone. Like the rest of the 'new' SGI, there is nothing special about the SGI 750 Itanium box, it's the same box with the same Intel reference board that HP, Dell, and others are selling.
SiliconGraphics has left the building. The "hip new" SGI is here. Quit using the old logo, it reflects a much cooler company that no longer exists.
My machine at work is an older G4/533... (533 MHz PowerPC 7410, 512 MB of CAS-3 [slower] PC133 SDRAM, and the stock OEM nVIDIA GeForce2 MX). While 95% of my time (ok, 85%, but don't tell my boss) is spent in Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, and Cleaner 5, I have installed and played with some of the latest wizbang games. Quake 3, FAKK2, DeusEx, and UT all play very smoothly. "Timedemo" benchmarks show numbers in the 50 - 75 frame-per-second area. Just how much better does a game player need? I would imagine that the GeForce 3 gives even better performance, as well as the CPU improvements in the current G4s (733, 800, and 867 MHz PowerPC 7450). And who doesn't replace the stock mouse with a real one? Just like I did with my old Dell, the first thing I did was buy a nice 3 button scroll-wheel mouse. Works great in Mac OS 9.1 and OS X.
Sure the Mac is no gamer's dream, but it plays games as well as I would ever want. Plus it's a great workhorse.
I realize the poster is refering to the Macintosh (Mac) when he mentioned "MAC". But it just looks odd, like it's an acroynm or something.
Aside from the P233MMX machine I bought for $150 in 1998, I haven't made a better purchase choice than the new (white) Apple iBook. It's small, it's light, it's fast, and the battery lasts a good 4 hours. Though perhaps my favorite feature is the keyboard... the keys are full size and have normal spacing, and the travel is decent. Best laptop keyboard I've ever used. Mac OS 9.1 works great, OS X is coming along nicely, and YellowDog Linux works like a charm -- even has zippy fast XFree86 acceleration via the RageMobility128 right out of the box.
Get an iBook, you won't be sorry. (Now if only the 3 year extended warranty was cheaper...)
... is that X+1.0 will be around the corner! RedHat 8.0 probably won't be 100% stable, but it should be a cool new bit of software! I'll be installing 7.2 beta tonight, but what I'm really looking forward to will be the schweeet Red Hat 8.0 later this year!
gcc 3.0 has been out for a long time already and there's no reason not to use it. 2.95 and the unoffical 2.96x are ancient by today's standards. 3.0 is the latest version and it works quite well. A bit faster, too.
This is really cool, I love open betas! Great way to try some newer versions of kde and gnome!
Most of my machines are running (patched) 7.1, but I do have a few still on 7.0. I'm really looking forward to 7.2 final, but I'll sure use the beta right away. One of my friends is still using 6.2, heh.
SGI have to be careful because the maya release on macOS X means that alot of artists will move to the mac and ditch the SGI's UNLESS SGI can ship a decent LINUX model
Ahh, but remember, SGI owns Alias|Wavefront (the company that makes Maya). There is a very good possibility that SGI may bring A|W back into SGI and become a software-only company.
That's the cube I want, and it should be out within a couple years. PS3 is nice. Game Cube is neat. But I'm willing to wait another two years for the hardware (and games) to look like they're straight out of Shrek or the FF movie.
I assumed they'd use a buttload of SGI systems like Pixar does.
Pixar, like Square, uses SGIs for the initial modeling and animation. They also use SGIs for the final (post-render) compositing. Neither Pixar nor Square use SGIs for rendering, though. Square used a huge Linux farm and Pixar uses a huge Sun farm.
The renderfarm consists primarily of ~1000 Linux machines (PIII, custom-built, rack mounted), running Red Hat 6.2. These machines do all the RenderMan renders, as well as a number of other tasks.
Schweet!!!