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Motif did. But those were "base OSF/1" features (HP was a founding member of OSF), not DEC OSF/1 "enhanced features"

I understand that. This was in response to your answer to my question "Will OpenVMS run on these" and you said no. So Altix is a dedicated oddball Linux platform? And that's it? That's what I meant about "making Itanic even less useful than it apparently already is." Altix for some reason(?) can't run the main (only?) OS actually ported to Itanium as a dedicated home platform. That's called making Itanic even less useful than it apparently already is. It's not like they had 100 possible OS choices and they could afford to preclude 50 of them from running on them. They can't support the main Itanium OS... why not?

What OS did I want? Anything but Linux. The last thing the world or any individual needs is another discontinued expensive proprietary oddball Linux platform. It's a colossal waste of time and money for no benefit over platforms that are already available and already run Linux better. Intel knows this, they're already out of the Itanium compiler business. Everybody's who has any sense is bailing. What's the point of this?

I'm all for new platforms, look at my icon! But this feels like people can't admit defeat and are putting out bizarre stuff for nothing but masochistic reasons.



I don't know the history but i ASSumed OpenVMS was one of the first if not the first OS to be ported to Itanium. If Altix can't run IRIX and it can't run OpenVMS and all it can run is Linux then it seems like a colossal waste of time and effort for anybody to make it and Itanium is dead for all intents and purposes anyway. Is there no shortage of cheaper/faster platforms including Intel x64? I don't see the point of this. At all. Whoever did this should be taken out and shot and then picked up and shot again. Twice.

It is very nice that FreeBSD might support it. Any additional OS choices are good. But that is after the fact. I still don't understand why anybody would spec out and build an Itanium box that could only run Linux (as far as they knew). Oh I'm sure you can get all the apps you need from itanicpackages.net and all but as soon as you get off Intel Linux is already not very friendly. This just doesn't make any sense. If it would have run OpenVMS then at the time it would have made sense. But now?

Can I think of realistic candidates? No, that's the whole point. Nobody can. Now that OpenVMS is going away and Intel (the guys who make the hardware) have stopped compiler development for the platform it's dead. There's no point in prolonging the agony. Why oh why do we have to see this?

As SAQ pointed out, Altix was a scale-up, Single System Image (SSI) platform for High Performance Computing (HPC). If you wanted to have 256 CPUs with serious floating point performance and a fast low-latency interconnect in 2003, this was a good option. Very often for this end of the market programmer time is cheap compared to bringing enough compute power to bear, so if you've got to port your code, or the libraries you use, you do it to make the jobs run within a week instead of a month. And frankly with so much HPC work happening on Linux in loosely-coupled clusters in the '90s, it's not such an oddball choice of OS.

Remember that AMD only released the first 64-bit Opteron in April 2003. Today is there a reason to choose Itanium over x86_64 for net-new systems? Perhaps for some specific cases - and not considering recent vendor games around support for the architecture. But ten years ago, that was a different equation.

And regardless, I started this thread so we could work out what OS options were available for hobbyists who were getting their hands on used SGI Altix platforms today, as they become more common on eBay, etc. Not anybody shopping for new hardware.

PR link announcing Altix 3000 in 2003
Pre-release SGI Itanium announcements focus on Cray, NEC supers (2002)
The Reg on Altix 3k and technical computing (2003)

Ok, thanks for the explanation. I figured I was missing some important facts. Sorry about any unintended thread-derailment.

Is it possible to plug a graphics adapter in one of the PCI-slots of a base module or a CMPX module and run X11? Although 10 years ago AGP was the dominating connector for graphics adapters there were still some PCI-cards on the market. The question is if ia-64 drivers for Linux were provided then.

I don't know. It probably wouldn't hurt anything to drop one in and try, but it all depends on what kind of X server-side software/support your distro includes, and what it makes of the card. If it's a well supported card and a generic kernel it might work, but I'm just guessing.

Don't waste your time with Freebsd on altix, it wouldn't work if you have more than one CPU enabled, and even so, it will crash now and then, and no one is really interested working on this.

Debian 6 will work; that's what I run on our altix cluster.