Specs On New SGI Onyx And Origin 154
An anonymous reader wrote in to tell us that
SGI has announced their latest and greatest MIPS-based computers, the Onyx and Origin 3000 line. Up to 1 TB RAM and 512 processors, all on a single system (not a cluster).
Beyond Boxes has a nice summary, too. This is definitely a great system for anyone who wants to
have their computer be the size of several refrigerators ;)
Gaming machine? (Score:1)
luckman
now if Apple could do the same thing (Score:1)
with the PowerMacCube with gigabitethernet and Mac OS X you'd have something wonderful that would make the Beowolf type architectures mindblowingly fast and amazingly small..
Imaging a room full of these ----
Re:First! (Score:1)
Re:Not a cluster? (Score:2)
Yeah, I know. After I posted it, I realised that noticably wasn't the right word. Perhaps measurably would have been better. The point I was trying to make (and I guess I didn't succeed very well) is not that you could use a cluster of off-the-shelf machines instead of an O3K, but that the O3K (and other large machines) had some cluster-like properties housed in a single case. Bandwidth and latencies may be orders of magnitude better, but architecturally, they're similar (although not identical).
Re:It is definitely not a cluster, it's NUMA (Score:2)
Ermmm... no. Data General and Sequent have both been shipping NUMA boxen for many years now.
you get what you pay for (Score:1)
1. Getting high FPS on games
2. Getting high benchmark scores
SGI concentrates on realtime rendering and processing. Their video cards have dedicated mpeg/jpeg rendering engines and don't forget the cpus are 64 bit. Given the choice of a 1Ghz pIII or a 200Mhz Onyx, I would take the Onyx in a heartbeat.
Re:Bandwidth... (Score:1)
That was the crucial detail I was missing.
Thank you very much.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
Re:Still the king of graphics? (Score:2)
I, personally, wouldn't have a use for one (other than bragging rights :-), but it's not actually that big. At 48bpp (16 each for RGB), you could get 3900x1792, an aspect ratio and resolution that may well be suitable for motion pictures using digital projection. Alternatively, you could have a triple-headed 1600x1200 display. I've worked at companies where three 1280x1024 displays per machine were commonplace, so it's not that unreasonable.
Re:Hrm, who needs these anymore? (Score:1)
But ya thats the one time these monsters would look cheap is when you check how much it would cost to put one in orbit
Just in time for Christmas (Score:1)
Dissenter
Re:Still the king of graphics? (Score:1)
Now, we can only drive a maximum of 8 displays per pipeline, so to drive 8 displays at 1600x1200 means 240megs. That means that there is still 80 megs left. Hmm. I guess if we bump up the resolution to 1920x1200 that would increase our frame buffer useage to 294megs, which only leaves us a little over 20megs free.
Now, 8 displays may sound rediculous, but now that I think about it, these machines are made to run CAVEs and video walls, so maybe 8 displays ain't so bad.
Re:Questions... (Score:2)
The nicest thing about the SGI machines is that they have low-latency interconnect. Complete cache coherency is on the order of nanoseconds - not your microsecond latency on SCI or Myrinet, or your millisecond latencies on Ethernet (and those latter latencies are for data transfer only). A lot of supercomputing tasks can be done by a cluster of Linux machines these days; but for exactly the class of applications you're talking about (lots of communication/contention) this is the machine you'd want to run it on. The other class of applications (of course) is detailed simulations with a fine grid size - where else can you get 1TB of shared memory? ;)
As far as the kernel goes, it's been scaled from 1..512 processors. There is almost no kernel overhead in computational code to begin with anyway (sure, that simulation may run for 100 hours, but it makes about 1000 system calls), but Irix does a pretty decent job of staying out of the way (aside from periodic stupidness of the scheduler anyway).
No offense, but comparing Linux/BSD/whatever kernel overhead to commercial high-end UNIX overhead is like comparing apples to oranges. Sure, Linux may scale to 8 processors ok, but that's way different than scaling to 512 (which is very difficult to do).
Re:Still the king of graphics? (Score:2)
Yep, mea culpa. I was dividing 320MB by 48, not by 6 (or 8, if you assume 32-bit word aligned accesses).
Re:Advancing technology (Score:1)
He was refering to personal computers running DOS (i'm not sure that anyone outside of Xerox had seriously done any experimenting with GUI's before at least the early 80's). But regardless, it's just silly to keep bringing that up 20 years later...
End of off-topic comment...
And yes, I know you were being sarcastic, I just failed to laugh is all...
This is not a cluster. (Score:3)
Actually, they can't be.
This is not a cluster - it's a multiprocessing supercomputer designed as a single unit. The internal busses have far, far greater bandwidth than even the expensive networks in a high-end cluster.
It does have competition - the Sun Starfire. But that's about it.
Clusters are definitely useful, and give you by far the best bang-for-the-buck on problems with relatively light communications load, but problems with a heavy communications load are best run on machines with high communications bandwidth, like this one.
Re:Still the king of graphics? (Score:1)
Besides which, this isn't a single user machine. No one in the world is going to buy one so they can sit a user in front of it to make animations. This is the type of box that will get shipped to the DoD, NSA, various univerities, and large corporations that need to build virual prototypes (Detroit and Japan).
And no. At this level of the market, Linux just can't compete. Lower-end, yes, but not up here...
Re:First! (Score:1)
I think you missed the "UNIX is amazing" comment.
Four interesting facts about O3000 series (Score:5)
1. The CDROM is on an internal FireWire bus.
2. The system disk is Fibre Channel.
3. SGI hasn't made a big deal about it yet, but the system will accept either MIPS or Intel processors in the same CPU modules. The MIPS processors come on one kind of daughtercard, and the Itaniums (Itania?) on another. You can't mix-and-match MIPS and IA-64 CPUs in the same machine, but you can mix-and-match in the same cluster.
4. The IA-64 based versions of the 3000 series will include the Linux kernel along an some IRIX compatibility layer.
Hrm, who needs these anymore? (Score:3)
Debra Goldfarb, group vice president at analyst firm IDC, agrees: "Modular computing empowers end users to build the kind of environment that they need not only today but over time. SGI, with this product, is really ahead of the curve in the market. We are seeing the [rest of the] industry absolutely trying to catch up" with SGI.
So the rest of the industry is playing "catchup" to SGI ?! I don't really think there's a huge market for large-scale multiprocessor machines when equivalents can be built up easily from cheap hardware and fast network infrastructure. The last time I saw an SGI was the NASA AMES crew using one for their amazing Viz tool, and even they were making mutterings about porting it to NT and Linux for ease of maintenance and actual use.
In addition, SGI Origin 3000 servers and SGI Onyx 3000 visualization systems reflect a return to SGI's core competencies.
At least that's true. The NT machines were a joke. Anyone tried SGI Linux yet?
Re:Can you imagine..... (Score:1)
price (Score:1)
Re:News just in SGI run out of names (Score:2)
Re:Questions... (Score:2)
Re:The Onyx1 (Score:1)
Re:Evil architectures(compare to sun E10000) (Score:1)
(didn't SGI have a rather big lead on sun with SMP ??)
On the sun "starfire" (E10000) CPU boards( with up to 4 CPU's) can be hot-swapped ...)
(after migrating the procceses running on them of course
Also AFAIK CPU(system boards) can be added to the System (with no reboot)
As well as moving CPU boards between domains ( again: with no reboot)
Of course the E10000 has no NUMA & tops out at 64 Processors
BTW You may find it interesting that sun is claiming the E10000 replacment(using UltraSparc III) will have NUMA & scale to 1000 processors
You may also have noticed that a lot of this functionality (except domains) has been "downported" to the E[3456]500 models
--
Re:Evil architectures(compare to sun E10000) (Score:1)
As for the E10k followon being NUMA, I'll believe it when I see it. Sun has previously said that they don't think NUMA is a good thing. Also, we heard they were working on an architecture called COMA (bad name, but it stands for Cache Only Memory Architecture) where you treat all of memory as a cache and let cache lines move wherever. If they *are* really doing NUMA on 1000 processors, they are going to find that the jump from 64 to 1024 is more like scaling a cliff than a gentle slope... Besides, Sun's NUMA stuff is vapor - ours runs *now* :)
It is definitely not a cluster, it's NUMA (Score:5)
Re:you get what you pay for (Score:1)
by the way, the x86 scores you quote are exaggerated. most intel pcs would choke at 400 because of bottlenecks.
Frankly I'm not overwhelmed (Score:4)
Don't get me wrong, I love SGI's machines and use one daily. Even passed up on a faster PC (running Windows) because I like it so much. But there is no way I could cost justify getting a new one. They simply do not provide enough performance to justify the cost anymore. All the demos of their stuff we've seen doesn't indicate that their new machines are a huge leap in performance. (meaningfully faster to be sure but not nearly enough to justify the cost of a new one) Fortunately for SGI they make a ton of money on each Onyx & Origin they sell but if they aren't careful this could easily evaporate out from under them. They make very cool systems but it is not a well run business IMO. I'll be somewhat suprised if SGI doesn't get bought out by someone in the next year or two.
Re:Ah HA! (Score:1)
Re:Bandwidth... (Score:1)
Check out Chapter 7 of Greg Pfister's "In Search of Clusters" (ISBN 0-13-899709-8)
Advancing technology (Score:4)
I foresee a day when computers may be as small as one refridgerator. Probably there will be a world market for no more than 10 of these.
--
Give us our karma back! Punish Karma Whores through meta-mod!
Re:Can you imagine..... (Score:1)
First! (Score:2)
And wants several refrigerators to cool the system, too. Can Linux even handle that many processors, let alone make good use of them? UNIX is simply amazing...
Who buys these things (Score:2)
Bandwidth... (Score:3)
System Bandwidth
3200: 11.2 Gigabytes/sec
3400: 44.8 GB/sec
3800: 716 GB/sec
...methinks they skipped a decimal point here.
(if not, please explain!)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
Re:Who buys these things (Score:1)
Re:Quake anyone? (Score:1)
Break out the motion-sickness pills!
To every linux comment: (Score:1)
And the efficiency of the system depends on the efficiency of the processes running on it; if your program knows how to use stuff like MPI and forks itself off lots of times, then yes, you will get extremely good performance. But one process of SETI@Home won't do very well...
Re:Who buys these things (Score:1)
Yesterday Ascii white was announced to be sold to the public...
Damn, I missed that, and I was thinking it was custom built for Lawrence Livermore or whomever. Just the thing for the new 3D space shootup I'm writing in Java. PS, how big are two basketball courts?
Origin FAQ (Score:3)
Re:Can you imagine..... (Score:2)
Re:Questions... (Score:2)
That said, what's to stop each running thread from using one or four or whatever processors. I mean, unless the software is specifically to use 512 processors, wouldn't it kind of work as a really great multitasker?
Like I said, I don't know much about SMP.
Re:What to do with it? (Score:1)
Goatse.cx is not a troll thing! It is a spammer thing!
All you spammers ran off with the perfectly good troll name and defaced it! It's like the l33t d00dz script kiddies who ran off with the hacker name! You are not trolls... you are spammers!
</rant>
Re:Big Computer (Score:1)
Re:To every linux comment: (Score:2)
Now they ship this monster. For large problems, No OS can touch IRIX, and no hardware can touch this. For people wanting to make the "clusters are better argument", well, if you happen to have the small variety of problem thats "clusterizable", this thing will run those too, and quite well. Furthermore, you can always cluster a bunch of these guys together for _thousands_ of cpus and _terabytes_ of ram... and it will all be using interconnects a shit of a lot faster than what you can get elsewhere.
Finally, if you pay attention, you'll see that the whole thing is totally modular. It doesn't have to run MIPS cpus. You can yank the C-bricks and throw in an IA-64 c-brick (sometime in the future). It's _NOT_ a MIPS-based architecture. It's a modular supercomputing platform.
SGI has done their homework adopting the lessons learned in DASH (and later FLASH). As a result they've got the most scalable real-world-useful computer there is.
Re:First! [really - real background] (Score:3)
Re:Who buys these things (Score:1)
Re:Still the king of graphics? (Score:2)
But does it really do the same graphics processing? Can a Voodoo5 or GeForce2 handle 48-bit colour for example (as used by the motion picture industry)? How about a 320MB framebuffer with 256MB texture RAM?
Re:Hrm, who needs these anymore? (Score:1)
The Onyx1 (Score:2)
But alas, the proprietary $15,000 memory module fried itself after the warranty expired and the machine was sold (for parts, I guess). No heated footstools in our computer room any more...
Re:Who buys these things (Score:1)
Re:Hrm, who needs these anymore? (Score:1)
Re:Origin FAQ (Score:1)
Re:The Onyx1 (Score:1)
The prof in charge of the machince constantly complains about performance. He seems to think this machine is helplessly out date since the new NT machine can pump out more polys. However, I think that this machine is misused. The first and formost problem is that instead of using OpenGL, then use a library called World Tool Kit(WTK). WTK is easy to use, but it limits what can be done. Specifically, you can't do the types of things with WTK that the Onyx excels at, namely multi pass texturing, so WTK is just emphasizing the machines weeknesses.
I'm trying to get my basic world system up and running on linux (I don't have much yet) so that I can port it to the Onyx in such a way as to emphasize the Onyx strengths, rather than its weeknesses.
Re:Still the king of graphics? (Score:1)
Re:Advancing technology (Score:1)
--
Re:Who buys these things (Score:1)
I got to use a 4 node Origin 2100 for a bit until it replaced the 2 node Origin we had for a file server.
It was the fastest renderer I had. Great for single frames and good for multiple frames.
If a company needs large frame renders or single frames done fast, a NUMA style machine is needed.
Having the large capacity of memory alos alows several smaller render jobs at a time.
A machine like this would be a dream for me.
I don't think that the cost/performance metric would pay off for the type of rendering that we do but I can see other places that would benifit from it.
Re:Who buys these things (Score:1)
How about these people:
FF Movie Info [thegia.com]
Watch the newest trailer.
Who buys em (Score:1)
Re:Who buys these things (Score:1)
Yes, there's a decent market for these machines. Given SGI's situation, however (they've restructured every quarter for the past 2 years) and the fact that the (non-embedded) MIPS processor line is a few generations behind similar offerings from IBM and Sun, I've a feeling that many customers with just-fat-enough wallets will take a wait and see on these machines, or just look at similar offerings from more stable companies.
I don't know about that. We benchmarked a handful of our regularly used programs - mostly molecular dynamics and quantum chemistry stuff - and SGI's 3000 system looked just as good as the competition if not better. In fact, SUN was so bad on floating point performance that we didn't bother to run the full complement of benchmarks. (That'll change late this year, but we needed systems now.)
Anyway, SGI came out on top when raw CPU performance, system scalability using our codes and I/O were considered together. So, we are going to receive a 3800 as soon as SGI can deliver one. Can't wait!
As far as company stability goes, no customer is going to buy a truly large machine without a lot of legalese in the contract that spells out what happens if things go wrong. Company failure is usually factored in. Me, I am not concerned. SGI has too much good technology, and also too much cash in the bank to simply disappear from the scene. They could be snapped up by someone else, perhaps, but would that change much? SUN did not make any major changes to the E10000 when they got it from Cray in '96, did they?
Re:Bandwidth... (Score:2)
Not Imax (Score:1)
Re:Hrm, who needs these anymore? (Score:2)
Re:Quake anyone? (Score:1)
http://reality.sgi.com/sgiquake
Not a cluster? (Score:3)
With boxen this size, the boundary between a single machine and a cluster tends to get a little blurred anyway. Even SGI are stressing the fact that it's a modular system. Basically, each module has it's own CPUs and memory, and has connectivity to the other modules in the system. What's the difference between that and a conventional cluster? Mostly the phenomenal inter-module bandwidth, but that's just a matter of numbers. Architecturally, is there much difference? OK, so you have a single OS image running across all CPUs, but is that even true any more? Certainly other large systems (e.g., from Sun or Data General) let you run multiple versions of the OS concurrently on a single box as you see fit.
Re:Hrm, who needs these anymore? (Score:2)
Granted though, initial installation of an SGI is easier than a cluster.
Re:Big Computer (Score:1)
And it runs quake! (Score:2)
Re:Still the king of graphics? (Score:2)
Keep in mind that until a month ago, SGI's top-of-the-line graphics board sets (MXE and IR2) were the same designs that originally appeared as Maximum IMPACT on Indigo2 and InfiniteReality on Onyx R10000. About five years ago, give or take.
During that time, entire graphics hardware companies have come and gone. The really good ones have caught up to, and occasionally surpassed, what SGI was doing in 1994. Impressive. Most impressive. ;-)
Now SGI has released Vpro, which despite having one name is actually two totally different workstation graphics designs. The Vpro you can get in the IA-32 workstations is basically high-bin commodity graphics hardware from a company that shall remain nameless.
But the Vpro that comes in the Octane2 looks outstanding. I haven't had a chance to use it yet, so I won't endorse, but the design specs for the Buzz chip make it look like InfiniteReality performance on the desktop. Way better than anything in the commodity market right now, and way more expensive, too. It's one of those things: if you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it.
And so we are all a part of the great Circle of Life.
Re:Also... (Score:1)
Re:Hrm, who needs these anymore? (Score:2)
ANS: Who uses these things? (Score:3)
As for how this is different than a Beowulf cluster, look at the bandwidth! Even with switched 10/100 Ethernet as your Beowulf 'backplane' most switches have just enough backplane bandwidth to handle every 100 Mb connection, some have a little less. sgi has always had amazing bandwidth numbers, this is just taken to the N'th degree.
AND this is one machine, one OS, unlike a cluster of many independant machines, much easier to administer.
These are simply awesome machines, now maybe sgi can sell a bah-zillion of them and I can get my Indy sold
g:wq
Evil architectures (Score:1)
Any operating system that requires a reboot to detect a new config is not worthy to ever be called a Server OS. Uptime is uptime, even when memory needs to be swapped or a disk added.
We will only come out of these dark ages of clunky cumbersome computing is we insist on it. Requiring reboots is evil, and should be minimized, whether for hard or software. Architect for it.
Re:price (Score:1)
Re:Evil architectures (Score:1)
FWIW, the O3k qualifies as "real hardware".
Redundancy. What a beautiful thing.
Re:now if Apple could do the same thing (Score:1)
Re:Some perspective (Score:2)
It's tricky enough to design file-systems that are properly distributed. I did some design for a school thesis [unl.edu] for a serverless distributed file-system with useful fault tolerance features. Thats pretty tricky in and of itself, even to support UNIX file-semantics. Building on something like that to build a strong and safe RDBMS would be quite a feat.
People _really_ like the single-machine programming paradigm. The OS at every level needs to emulate that behavior as much as possible, regardless of the reality of the situation. Hence, the need for a good file-system. (see Berkely xFS for the right approach, or Centravision for a shipping product looks interesting). RDBMS are already choked by locking algorithms and contention on SINGLE CPU machines. It should be no surprise that a fast RDBMS that is fully distributed and scalable isn't widely available. To do it right you've got to have transparent internal replication of basially everything. Not just data and meta-data, but even logic. Coming up with a serverless (and thus usefully scalable) scheme that gives strong enough guarantees for RDBMS applications yet still survives and survives corectly and quickly and doesn't bog down the system with locking will be quite a feat for whoever manages to do it.
Re:Evil architectures (Score:1)
However, what you *can* do is shut down a single partition of a multi-partition system without affecting the rest of it. Also, we have some stuff in Irix to throw away pages that have double bit errors in them without panic'ing the system in some cases. More RAS features are planned to be added over time.
And I definetly agree - O3k is "real hardware" :)
Re:Not a cluster? (Score:1)
It's possible to build a shared memory cluster, although I don't know of anyone doing so.
Yes it is possible with some very large caveats. Most important is that there is little to no OS support for large memories (>8 GB or 64 GB in the 2.4.0 kernel). Secondly, the compiler technology doesn't know anything about the architecture of the machine (on the MIPS machine, it does), so it cannot schedule resources appropriately. Finally, the interconnect in a cluster is at least one order of magnitude higher in latency and at least one order of magnitude lower in bandwidth, which is terrifically critical to the performance of fine grained parallel codes (the raison d'etre for large SSI machines).
So, yes, you might be able to build a machine with superficially the same properties, but it would cost you a tremendous time and effort to achieve anything like what SGI has. The question that immediately comes to mind is why you would want to do this. Certainly any such machine you could build (even out of commodity components) would not be cheaper if you factor in all the time and engineering effort that would need to go into it to achieve the same results.
You also wrote:
Yes, but not without cost. Local NUMA memory accesses will be noticably quicker than remote NUMA memory accesses. Building a shared memory cluster from separate machines will give you the same properties, although the difference between local and remote accesses will be much greater.
I have to scratch my head over this. The word noticably is what bothers me. Each router that the memory traverses in the origin adds ~200ns to the cost of getting the cache line. The O2k has at max 4 router traversals. The cacheline is at most ~1100 ns away. With page migration, you can even move frequently accessed pages around, though this is a hard tunable to adjust for, and largely you get marginal improvements at best. The O3k has a lower latency traversal cost per router. Something like 1/3 of the O2k. The bandwidth is also about 2x better. So noticably here becomes ~600 ns.
I don't know about you, but I won't notice that.
Moreover, with the R12k out of order execution, a cacheline stall will not halt the computation. The R12k can have up to 6 cacheline misses being handled before the EU stalls. So remote pages (and their latency) is not noticable.
The cost to access remote pages is largely hidden and not noticable. On a cluster, there is no OS support for remote pages. You have to use PVM/MPI/flavor of the day to send messages and pages. Latencies are on the orders of tens of microseconds at best. You will most certainly not get the same performance characteristics, and very different scaling properties.
Re:Four interesting facts about O3000 series (Score:1)
I wonder how this can be possible -- it sounds like something marketing pushed through because "Linux is very hip". Who the f. would be dumb enough to run Linux/Intel on one of these things?
Linux scales well to what, 4 processors?
Of course, this is my uninformed impression. But IMO Linux is for PCs -- and there's a helluva big difference between Linux & Cox and the people at SGI, and certainly also between the software they write.
NumaFlex (Score:2)
Crap name, but I really think this 'brick' implementation is a great idea, and although I don't doubt the backplane/bus adds a certain amount of overhead to the cost, it'd be nice to see this sort of thing on Workstation and Desktop systems. And yes, I know similar things have been tired before (Acorn?)
PC getting slow or out of date? Add a new processor brick, that gets detected and used with just a reboot. Keep the old brick if you want. Graphics too slow? Just bought a second 19" monitor? Add a new graphics brick.
Im not suggesting this is a cheap or easy solution (yet) but its a much nicer one that PCI slots, and a tidier one than USB...
Pax,
White Rabbit +++ Divide by Cucumber Error ++
Re:Still the king of graphics? (Score:2)
Ever wonder why Pixar has so many SGIs? It isn't because they have the extra money to burn. Its because SGI _IS_ the best at graphics. Until you use one for visualization (my department does a LOT of vis work - combat simulation), you have no idea the power of these things.
Re:Origin FAQ (Score:3)
Big entertainment companies seem to be at the front of the line for the new systems. Here are some SGI press releases:
Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI) Selects SGI Origin 3000 Series As Broadband Server for Next Generation Entertainment Demonstration [yahoo.com]
SGI Is Preferred Provider of Content Creation Workstations and Servers For Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) [yahoo.com]
Pixar Selects Silicon Graphics Octane2 High-Performance Visual Workstations As Production Platform [yahoo.com]
So you can expect Star Wars Episode 2, and Toy Story 3, to harness the power of these babies.
Re:Advancing technology (Score:2)
From "Much Apu About Nothing" ( Season 7 )
See "The Definitive Frink" [internerd.com]
cheers,
j.
Re:Not a cluster? (Score:3)
Login to a 3000, you don't even know what node your on, in fact the system doesn't give you any impression that its any different from a small up or mp. The thing that tips you off is the load of 200, 400, or 500+. Depending on whats going on on the system, your process may be migrated from one node to another without you noticing. On the 3000, any process on any processor can access every page on every node -- all through regular memory references.
Some perspective (Score:3)
Believe it or not, this is actually the kind of business model that the Fortune 500 are not only happy with, but demand.
Personally, I'd be happy with a database that could run on a loose, fault-tollerant network of a dozen or so small (e.g. 2-processor Intel or Alpha) systems.
Then again, I'd really like to play with some of SGI's big iron....
Ah HA! (Score:2)
The new models are on the way!
Rami James
Guy with Duh.
--
A good way to impress (geek) women (Score:3)
Re:BORING! LINUX SMOKES SGI FOR 3D [NO] (Score:2)
It is trivial to check:
http://www.d2.com/text/faq/main.html
and see what tools they use.
In the last 10 years, consider all of the films that won Academy awards for Computer-Generated special effects, and add in all of those nominated. Of these films, can you name the films that did *not* use SGI?
Finally, to avoid this being an SGI versus LInux, do recall that SGI is seriously investing in LInux work and contributing to the community in this turf, so it's not like we dislike it, just the facts.
News just in SGI run out of names (Score:2)
"We just ran out of names beginning with O" said Spokesman Otto Olson, head of names. The Ohshit and the Omygod were really scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Oliver Ottowan added "We really should have used a more common letterlike T or S."
Re:Who buys these things (Score:3)
I see the 8-processor boxes being a hot seller in a lot of research labs, or where people just want a centralized server.
These machines are very similar to an SMP machine from a programmer's perspective. (From a hardware perspective, they're vastly different, each CPU has its own local memory, although the entire system memory is treated as one big block. It just happens that local memory is much faster to access.)
We have an older 8-processor SGI machine at work that people use to do scientific simulations. Rarely are the simulations themselves paralellized, but instead, people log in and the system gives em' a processor all to themselves if one is free. I think my boss is looking to replace it eventually... Any time someone gets a new system, he wants people to run some benchmarks he wrote. My 500 MHz Coppermine gets twice the performance of a processor on the old machine for small problems, but as soon as the dataset gets larger than the CPU cache, the SGI's excellent memory system kicks in.
Re:Advancing technology (Score:2)
<sarcasm>
No one will ever need more than 512Kb.
Now excuse me while I write a program that has all of the bugs^H^H^H^Hfeatures of Internet Explorer, Word, Excel, and (everyone's favorite) Outlook.
</sarcasm>
Hmm, the sarcasm doesn't seem to have stopped.
Devil Ducky
Re:Still the king of graphics? (Score:2)
NVidia made SGI's "VPro" graphics chipsets...
You're half right. There are three-and-a-half flavors of Vpro right now. There's V3/VR3, which is an nVidia board with 32 or 64 MB of DDR RAM.
Then there's V6/V8, also known as Odyssey. These are available only in Octane2. They're an all-SGI design with the Buzz chip-- "OpenGL on a Chip!"-- at the heart.
There's talk of a V12, which I think is supposed to be a two-Buzz version of V8. That, if it happens, will be exactly twice the geometry performance of V8.
Odyssey-- V6, V8, V12-- look on paper like they're light-years ahead of the nVidia stuff you find in the 230/330/530 systems. I say "look on paper" because I haven't used one myself. Disclaim, disclaim.
We are borg-- (Score:2)
-j
Re:Not a cluster? (Score:2)
Agreed. However, cluster != beowulf. Beowulf is just one particular type of cluster (aiming for performance). Other clusters provide high availability. It's possible to build a shared memory cluster, although I don't know of anyone doing so.
On the 3000, any process on any processor can access every page on every node -- all through regular memory references.
Yes, but not without cost. Local NUMA memory accesses will be noticably quicker than remote NUMA memory accesses. Building a shared memory cluster from separate machines will give you the same properties, although the difference between local and remote accesses will be much greater.
Re:Who buys these things (Score:2)
---------///----------
Re:Bandwidth... (Score:2)
Yes, it will be years before Sun, IBM, HP can come up with a similar machine. Why is this important? Just read the SGI finicial statement where they declared their loss. They had orders for $100M even before this machine was announced. I am told that these things are being ordered so fast that manufacturing cannot keep up.
SGI is back. And they appear poised to kick some serious ass. I just hope that they start advertising so i can show my bosses that they are not dead.
Questions... (Score:2)
If they know something I don't here, I'd love to see it.
SGI and Linux (Score:3)
Of course, Irix also has a lot of graphics production tools that you don't find on any OS, Linux included. That's something else that'll keep Irix around, at least until equivalents exist. Ideally, we'd see SGI continue to take steps toward open source/Free software, with Irix components.
Anyway, looks like a pretty cool new system from the people who brought us the original colored computer. Can't wait to get my hands on one of these.
yours,
john