Nearly 30 years after Silicon Graphics ruled the high-performance computing roost, its supercomputers have found themselves a new home with a small community full of enthusiasts – some of whom weren’t even alive during the company’s heyday.
SGI machines are definitely on my list of platforms to sink my teeth into in the future. I don’t think I’ll be focusing on these more eccentric supercomputer-type workstations, but they are fascinating nonetheless. I’m very glad there’s an active community of people keeping these machines working.
SGI IRIX gear has quite a thriving hobbyist community. I feel it’s quite large and now’s a great time to get into it as the machines are turning up in discard sales quite cheaply.
Checkout http://irix.cc ..sadly NekoChan is dead (long live NekoChan!). It’s fun hardware.
I almost got into SGI machines back when Boeing was dumping SGI equipment by the pallet load at the old surplus store.
I remember stacks of Octane IIs and some other variants.
I should have snagged a couple, seems like they were around $60-75 at the time, and they had a lot of displays to go with them.
Oh well… really cool looking machines.
I had a collaberation with a professor that had one. Each one was given a research stipend upon hiring. He sunk the whole kit and kaboodle into the SGI IRIX.
It was nice. My first introduction to UNIX with a gui.
I still have an SGI and Sun Workstation up and running. The SGI is a fully loaded Tezro, R16000, V12, F220 LCD Display, 8GB RAM, 2X 640GB 15,000 RPM HD’s. The Sun is an Ultra 45 with 2x ULTRASPARC IIIi XVR-300, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, Sun 24.1 LCD Display, I use it for programming and it’s also my web/email server.
I also still use the SGI to edit my movies, they’re only 1080p but that is really all I need and the output quality is cinema, It’s actually quite amazing. I have so much fun making my little family home videos look like something that came out of hollywood. I use a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K with Rokinon Cine DS 6 Lens Kit, 50mm/35mm/24mm/85mm/14mm/135mm (best set of lens you can get for the money period).
The SGI is for fun, especially now that my new workstation is finally done, took almost a month to complete; AMD TR 32 Core, 64GB 3200, 2X Vega Frontier (from my old WS, used for rendering and the kids Steam Links, cheaper than buying them each a PC and they can still play any triple A game at over 60FPS),AMD WX 9100 that I got for only $1500 (main GPU), Davinci Resolve 15, CentOS and Blackmagic Micro Panel Control Surface (eBay $650).
Should be revised and brought back to duty.
🙂
FPGA with a VLIW CPU, and code morphing software… that’d be the ticket.
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There is a dude called dodoid on youtube i could strongly recommend, he let an australian mom connect to his workspace (and OSFirsttimer posted it on his channel, and dodoid is in america) it was interesting how much stuff you can still do with IRIX. Dodoid also announced that a new re-release of a irix fixpack D1 with a modern browser will be released soon. (guessing modern in this would mean anything before firefox 57, as that would require lots of work)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHFDLAa0LsQ
The project seems to be delayed with some bugs, but i bet he gets it done.
Fun stuff for us that still like the hardware.
Edit spelling errors.
Edited 2018-09-28 22:06 UTC
IRIX was my favorite non-free UNIX. It was just POSIX enough to get by, and just BSD enough to confuse the heck out of regular System V Release 4 people like me. Luckily, I cut my teeth on SunOS pre-Solaris, so I knew enough BSD-style UNIX to get around. The special edition release of IRIX 5.3 with the XFS filesystem was a real treat, and also becuase 5.x was thankfully mostly System V Release 4 compliant.
I used a Challenge S pizza box with an add-on graphics card as my desktop workstation. Or was it an Indy? I don’t think it was an Indy because I had to procure a dual-head graphics card and install it using their weird riser card format.
I knew that SGI was not going to have a long life because the Challenge S, basically a desktop Indy with no graphics card, still had the then-uber-expensive blue LED and the also expensive sculptured, textured, colorful case that literally only a couple hundred people would ever see in its lifetime at the data center. It even had the hi-fi speaker and volume buttons that the Indy did. It made little sense. The Wikipedia article claims there is no audio but I beg to differ even though I have no proof.
On the “supercomputer” front, the closest I got was ordering a POWER Challenge L (MIPS R8000) for something south of $50K. It had nothing to do with IBM POWER. It was just MIPS.
Edited 2018-10-01 04:02 UTC