@flexion In 1997 or so, somebody got my department a Challenge system on indefinite loan. I want to say it was one of the then-new R10000 systems, but wouldn’t swear to it. Unfortunately nobody knew what to do with it, so it sat almost entirely idle the whole time we had it. I felt bad for it so for a year or so my login routine opened a window and ran ‘dc’ on it, just in case I needed a calculator quickly.
Huh. I just realized that’s probably where I fell in love with RPN calculators.
@shelldozer thanks, I know Ian has one and have been in contact with him. Thing is, I don't know if that Onyx still works, so it would be an expensive experiment, buying and shipping a PSU from the UK. I'm still hoping to find someone nearby who will borrow me a power supply for a test run first. Or find a second Onyx / Challenge.
@flexion We had an entire retro SGI park at a former employer. Some were used on the road back in the day, with warning stickers on how to re-seat the mounted modules after transport. One used to be a community shell host. Some had up to 9 or 12 graphics outputs. That must have been fun times.
@flexion right on! I had SGI Reality Engines for my use at SAIC, Angel Studios, and a project at Disney. Awesome, but best to have the compute part far away from where I worked.
@flexion When I had a job as a student researcher with my university’s VR center in 1999, I really loved our Onyx 2 - not only for the great design and the colour TFT showing load in all four rendering pipelines, but also very much for the fact that you could dry your clothes quickly by hanging them near to its fans exhaust air streams. It was quite hot and loud though, in the student room where they had put it …
@sassageflare@kkarhan Dodoid is still around in the SGI scene.. he's working on DFRD (Dodoid Fast Remote Display), a PCI card to offload browser rendering via GL forwarding, to bring the modern web to IRIX 4Dwm desktops.
@flexion@kkarhan Whoa, if the project’s coming along now’s the time for me to get an SGI machine. ;·P
not like you make me want to get a few dozen already xD
Thanks for the links!
@sassageflare@flexion Have it's rear be a giant liquid cooling radiator with a bunch of Noctua fans that pull the air through the chassis and out to through the radiator...
@flexion@kkarhan I mean there’s people out there who’ve had three-phase power installed in their basement just so that they could have a bunch of the huge peak-cool rackmount SGI systems in there so…
@sassageflare@flexion I mean, if I had a house and not a condo, getting 3-Phase would be trivial as most houses in Germany have their breakers at the cellar...
@kkarhan Love that idea! It’s a shame we’ve settled on the most conventional and boring designs for workstations/personal computers. It’s one of the things that draws me to SGI machines, a kind of what-could-have-been situation. Yeah I know it’s not exactly like that and the present landscape is a sort of it-works-well-enough type of deal, but still… In a better world we’d be able to get together on a small-ish scale and actually pull something like that off, even if for just a few people who would want that kind of thing. :·D
@kkarhan Love that idea! It’s a shame we’ve settled on the most conventional and boring designs for workstations/personal computers. It’s one of the things that draws me to SGI machines, a kind of what-could-have-been situation. Yeah I know it’s not exactly like that and the present landscape is a sort of it-works-well-enough type of deal, but still… In a better world we’d be able to get together on a small-ish scale and actually pull something like that off, even if for just a few people who would want that kind of thing. :·D
(I’m having some problems with posting so sorry if you get more than one notification, had to delete and re-post)
@sassageflare
My point is that entire racks full of interconnected cages full of storage, accelerators, NICs, etc. is quite common in #HPC, and #SGI basically made HPC solutions for CAD & VFX...
@kkarhan Oh wow now I kind of want that case, ngl :D Even though I’d never use all the capabilities. Probably because I’ve never had the money to cram it full of things. But I’d try! :·P
I just love tinkering with this stuff, though a bunch of it goes over my head. I neither have a degree in tech (my major’s in English after all xD) nor have I ever worked on it, but I do find it utterly fascinating. I’ve just been limited by the stuff I can get and the space at home to put it all in. But I’d spend a lot more time messing around with it if I could. I'm way more interested in the professional uses for those systems than more usual stuff like games and the like that a lot of people get into retro stuff for. Like what you said, seeing how people used that computing power in the past to make amazing things is just fascinating stuff. I hope I can get my hands on some older professional gear in the future and learn a lot more about what makes it tick. And of course SGI stuff is near the top of my list. 😁
@kkarhan Off the top of my head that’s the fastest way to achieve full utilisation that I can think of. xD
I just wouldn’t know what do do with 10 (!) PCIe slots. Well I guess with enough M.2 adapters…
If money were no object I’d like to stick one of those Ampere boards with the 80-core CPU in there, if anything just for the sake of weirdness. x86 is boring. :·P
@kkarhan Ooh yea I had seen those but not an in-depth video before! It does look like an absolute powerhouse. And the way it’s put together is super interesting. Love the little box ramp! xD It does remind me of those kind of highly custom solutions of yesteryear. I wouldn’t know what to do with one of those of course. 😹
I feel like it’s absolutely the kind of thing we'll see people make videos about in like 20 years or so when they are retro and cheap the way we do about SGI systems now. :·P
I do got a #Z600 a while back when it was still blazing fast for daily use yet already affordable, and that thing is very boring in comparison to #nvidia's custom design with that seperate board on the back and hardline compressor cooling...
The problem is that these will have use issues as retro systems and I bet you they'll become a major pain in the rear like the notoriously leaky Dual - G5 #MacPro's from #Apple with their liquid coolers.
@kkarhan I like that Z600. HP workstations have a special modular vibe to them, I’m more used to their consumer offerings which are… Well you know. xD I like building a custom thing as much as the next person but there’s something about a workstation that has been designed by a particular vendor with their own idiosyncrasies and all. It can be done really well and give a solid feeling. As a kid I used to eye the x86 Sun Ultra workstations from the mid 2000s. And they still look sleek! Though the Nvidia one takes thing to the next level. That tubing alone just screams ‘industrial’ and ´performance´ to me.
Hahha, yeah most likely. You’re absolutely right. Hell I remember the G5s leaking even back then, let alone now. That green sludge! Dripping straight on top of the PSU! :·O Though I still have a soft spot for the G4s and G5s, there was an audiovisual lab full of them in a school I went to and I have fond memories. :D
@sassageflare I mean it's one of those with the brushed aluminium and black grills designed by BMW DesignWorks USA so it looks awesome.
Plus it was eligible for licensing Autodesk's suite for #Linux with #RHEL 6 installed - cuz #Autodesk won't sell that to you if you didn't have "proof of qualifying hardware"...
Also the HP z-Series are the reference machines for Autodesk to develop for, so my machine propably was originally working for an engineering firm before it got refurb'd and sold...
@kkarhan Mmm lovely stuff. I can always respect a Linuxy workstation even if it’s x86. 😜
And here we are talking about using top-notch performance computing tools while at my last job around December they gave me a 2009 Core 2 Duo Dell Optiplex to use. At some point I'd like to use proper equipment that doesn't lag horribly. I would’ve sold a kidney for a z600. 😂
@kkarhan Haha wow. Insert the nintendo ‘Now You're Playing With Power’ ad video here. Dual socket and quad-SLI??
Cons: that’s probably a tad loud
Pros: you won’t need central heating anymore
😹
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