So I, like a number of other people moved from my home to Silicon Valley as part of the gold rush. I had gone to school for an earth science, but found that I wanted to have a 'real job' (tm) before moving on to the life of poverty and humiliation that is graduate school.
It was a good time, and then the bubble burst. I was left scrambling for a job, like so many others. Through some dice searching, I managed to land a science gig with reasonable pay, back in my home state. Sounded good to me.
No, here's the problem: I forgot how eduational institutions operate. As a student, you are insulated froma lot of the political BS that flys around at higher levels in academia.Being technical staff for a bunch of scientists is no fun at all, especially if they have degrees in computer science (!!).
Now, I'm a system administrator, not a programmer, so my perspective might be a little different. All I can say is, be careful before making the jumpp back into the academic/science world - you might be in for some frustration. There is little in the IT world that can rival the ego of a PI (Principal Investigator) on a project. Be ready to have your opinions ignored, and get ready to do some crackheaded stuff in the name of keeping the researchers happy.
Ok people, let's get some things straight. First off, this is a _workstation_ so discussing it's use as a node in a render farm is kind of pointless, unless you use the 'free cpu in the office' model that some companies favor. Yes, x86 boxes are better for batch rendering. That's cool. It means that you can throw a lot of cheap hardware at a labor intensive process. Yippe.
Since this is a workstation, it's primary usage in the post production industry would be as a modeling or editing station, like the Octane/Octane2. Actually, looking at the specs, this looks like an "Octane lite." Note that in the expansion section they do not mention available XIO slots, so no HD (snowball) cards for this puppy. As for the lack of UMA mentioned by another poster, UMA was only ever available on the O2 and x86 visual workstations. Using the system memory for texture is good for CAD applications, but not so good for the real time manipulation of textures needed by Maya or Discreet's compositing applications. Note that the stock graphics are VPro V10 - pretty badass. Personally, I have a V6 in My Octane2. In short, this is an R14k single proc Octane, with no XIO, not too sure about the backplane, as there do not seem to be any fuel related docs up on techpubs yet. For 1/2 the price of an Octane2, this seems like a pretty good deal to me.
Now, as for the clock cycles. Please. Hasn't the recent AMD vs intel clock cycle mess taught you people anything? Clock Cycles !=speed. I mean really, this is not a box to play quake on. This is a box to design quake on. =)
Finally, on a personal note, I think it's pretty amusing that they have returned to the Crimson color scheme.
Good work all around lads, glad to see that there are still enough good people at sgi to get this kind of box out the door. I think that this box is a good mid range system, right between the O2 and the Octane.
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It was a good time, and then the bubble burst. I was left scrambling for a job, like so many others. Through some dice searching, I managed to land a science gig with reasonable pay, back in my home state. Sounded good to me.
No, here's the problem: I forgot how eduational institutions operate. As a student, you are insulated froma lot of the political BS that flys around at higher levels in academia.Being technical staff for a bunch of scientists is no fun at all, especially if they have degrees in computer science (!!).
Now, I'm a system administrator, not a programmer, so my perspective might be a little different. All I can say is, be careful before making the jumpp back into the academic/science world - you might be in for some frustration. There is little in the IT world that can rival the ego of a PI (Principal Investigator) on a project. Be ready to have your opinions ignored, and get ready to do some crackheaded stuff in the name of keeping the researchers happy.
Just my $0.02.
6.3 was an O2 only port of 5.3. It's 6.2 or 6.5.x for the Indigo2.
Since this is a workstation, it's primary usage in the post production industry would be as a modeling or editing station, like the Octane/Octane2. Actually, looking at the specs, this looks like an "Octane lite." Note that in the expansion section they do not mention available XIO slots, so no HD (snowball) cards for this puppy. As for the lack of UMA mentioned by another poster, UMA was only ever available on the O2 and x86 visual workstations. Using the system memory for texture is good for CAD applications, but not so good for the real time manipulation of textures needed by Maya or Discreet's compositing applications. Note that the stock graphics are VPro V10 - pretty badass. Personally, I have a V6 in My Octane2. In short, this is an R14k single proc Octane, with no XIO, not too sure about the backplane, as there do not seem to be any fuel related docs up on techpubs yet. For 1/2 the price of an Octane2, this seems like a pretty good deal to me.
Now, as for the clock cycles. Please. Hasn't the recent AMD vs intel clock cycle mess taught you people anything? Clock Cycles !=speed. I mean really, this is not a box to play quake on. This is a box to design quake on. =)
Finally, on a personal note, I think it's pretty amusing that they have returned to the Crimson color scheme.
Good work all around lads, glad to see that there are still enough good people at sgi to get this kind of box out the door. I think that this box is a good mid range system, right between the O2 and the Octane.