I remember in 1999/2000 I did a simple BLAST benchmark on my SGI Pentium
workstation running linux, and one on my R10k box. Similar clock
speeds. Pentium was 2x faster in Int heavy calcs. Did similar things
with FP, and discussed the results with my team and engineering.
None of them were happy.
I left SGI in 2001, after a discussion with the SVP of engineering,
Warren Pratt, who insisted that the future was not linux clusters, but
large beefy many cpu shared memory servers. I put my money/future where
my mouth was.
Today, I run on rackmount 1 and 2U boxes containing 80-128 CPU (cores),
and 2TB physical ram.
So yeah. He was right.
But they run linux, and are x86_64 arch.
On 3/23/23 15:08, Prentice Bisbal via Beowulf wrote:
Yeah, that whole situation was frustrating. From 2004 -2007, I was
working for a pharmaceutical startup supporting their Computer-Aided
Drug Discovery (CADD) team. Had I been hired before the director of
CADD, it would have been a 100% Linux shop. Instead, as soon as he was
hired he started insisting, and circulated a memo, stating that Linux
was still a toy for hobbyists and "not ready for primetime" (he used
that exact quote). So we spent tens of thousands of dollars on two
Octanes and the 8-way Origin 350. I got a Linux workstation as a
proof-of-concept, and that HP Workstation running Linux that cost only
a few thousand dollars ran circles around those SGI boxes, and when
cost was factored in FLOPS/$ was like 10x better than the SGI hardware
at that point. And all of that hardware was bought used ("remarketed")
from SGI, so new hardware would have compared significantly worse in
terms of value.
Also, it turned out the director of CADD owned a nontrivial amount of
SGI stocks, so not only was an he over-the-hill curmudgeon afraid of
new technology, there was also a pretty clear conflict of interest for
him to be pushing SGI, even though I'm sure our small purchase did
nothing to improve SGI stock value.
On 3/23/23 2:58 PM, Joe Landman wrote:
They had laid off all the good people doing workstations by then, I
think they outsourced design/production to ODMs by that time. MIP
processors were long in the tooth in 1999, never mind 2007.
Having been at SGI from 1995-2001, I can tell you the reason MIPS
sucked wind at that point, was the good ship Itanic sunk Alien and
Beast processors. Those design teams left, and we didn't have much
for post R10k, other than respins and shrinks of R10k. Which were
renamed R12k, R14k ...
Beast would have been relevant (near EOL though) in 2007.
On 3/23/23 14:53, Prentice Bisbal via Beowulf wrote:
Between 2003 and 2007, I worked with a lot of O2s, Octanes, an 8-way
Origin 350, and even a Tezro. I don't miss those days.
I always felt like the design of their workstations was done by the
same people who design Playskool toys rather than professional
hardware.
Prentice Bisbal
Senior HPC Engineer
Computational Sciences Department
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
Princeton, NJ
https://cs.pppl.gov
https://www.pppl.gov
On 3/23/23 1:08 PM, Ryan Novosielski via Beowulf wrote:
Seriously. I have an Indy and an Octane2 laying around. That’s not
even an SGI. :-P
--
#BlackLivesMatter
____
|| \\UTGERS,
|---------------------------*O*---------------------------
||_// the State | Ryan Novosielski - novos...@rutgers.edu
|| \\ University | Sr. Technologist - 973/972.0922 (2x0922) ~*~
RBHS Campus
|| \\ of NJ | Office of Advanced Research Computing - MSB
A555B, Newark
`'
On Mar 23, 2023, at 13:07, Michael DiDomenico
<mdidomeni...@gmail.com> wrote:
ack, irix flashbacks... :) fortunately, this machine isn't quite that
old, circa 2013
On Thu, Mar 23, 2023 at 1:02 PM Darren Wise via Beowulf
<beowulf@beowulf.org> wrote:
Hello,
I don't personally have such myself but anything SGI even with
today's
exotics Ians about the most knowledgable I know of globally and
seriously dying out within this sector, I hazard a guess your SM
board
would be considered quite new compared to other systems.
http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/sgidepot/
Kind Regards,
Darren Wise
Research Engineer, Mechatronics
https://wisecorp.co.uk, .us & .ru
On 23/03/2023 16:51, Michael DiDomenico wrote:
does anyone happen to have an old sgi / supermicro bios for an
X9DRG-QF+ motherboard squirreled away somewhere? sgi is long gone,
hpe might have something still but who knows where. i reached
out to
supermicro, but i suspect they'll say no.
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t: @hpcjoe
w:https://scalability.org
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l:https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelandman
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w:https://scalability.org
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l:https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelandman
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