zarma wrote:
And i forget to say on our SGI it takes 2 hours to install everythings from a clean install and without any particular
hardwares when it takes 1 day on Linux with 5000$ of specials harwares to get the same result
Yeah still only runs on Nvidia FX4x00/5X00 line of professional and *pricey* video cards. Even though there sitting on a fair bit of power, and if they choose to they could use Nvidia CUDA to directly use the video hardware's 128Streaming units to co-process video functions - they've decide all rendering will be in software now 'for better portability and compatibility'. Although all it will take is one vendor using the full power of the video system on the FX cards - like Discreet used on SGI's - and Discreet will be embarrassed by the performance and quickly start using the GPU to run code
Sadly Discreet more or less locks down the kernel on their machines and you can't do anything to customize it without being blacklisted for any support (which is good for the normal Joe Blow but could be a big problem for more complex, bigger and custom installations). Although the one bright side is they're finally givin up on their 'Stone Tax'. Some of the biggest post houses are still keeping their higher end SGI computer (O3K's) to run as CXFS meta-servers. But with CXFS being the only 'killer product' to sell (in that sector) SGI is all but ignoring the sector and isn't even pushing CXFS (which could generate insane sales/money if they cheapened it up and packaged it with their *UGH* Altix machines). Maybe now that they're using Nvidia GPU's they'll get back in the game and start selling Discreet on Altix which would give some killer performance to high end machine - that so far see no replacement for their large Onyx4/Fire machines in sight. Although Discreet has moved allmost(all ???) killer Fire features (like timeline) in Flame2008
CXFS as a singular product if market properly could make it onto a large quantity of datacenters and installation with multi-machine high-bandwidth shared-data needs. There are some solutions that compete - but they forced you into buying everything from them (drives, enclosures, computers, cables etc...) and are mostly just for Video networks - and not suited to data
SGi could of capitalized on the *HUGE* performance increase the NASA Columbia cluster got from CXFS - but they made like *one* press release and that was it. NASA provided more advertisements for CXFS just with their technical paper they released about the upgrade/speedup. Although it's unlikely IBM would ever start pushing CXFS as option instead for GFS but ... who knows ......I think SGI's should reelect Neko as chairman and everybody else should sit on the board via proxy votes !!! Knowing SGI's history if they where given the resources they could expande CXFS even more (features like for example machines being able to access the cache of other machines via FC/RDMA is data exists there instead of the hard disks) and make it much less 'rough and the edges'
Who else has SAN file system that competes (in any sector) with CXFS. There's Avid solution, and EMC - who else (that don't license EMC) ????
The transition to PC machines for Discreet has been a roughly road - that Discreet was pushed into taking because the exec's at SGI spent 1998-2003 (ish ???? when did Mr B go ??) using R&D money to smoke crack in the ghetto. I don't think you can consider asking the crack dealers if they'ld exchange all their 'rock' for a Octane valid market research - and just because they set all the racks from that 128 processor O2k that was exchanged for 'services for their girls' sideways so they can use them as a bench's doesn't mean the line is doomed and not useful because it's to 'hard' to use - and it's certainly no a reflection on IRIX not being 'user friendly'(yeah as a 'sofa' it is hard to use, espc on the ass - they prolly left the sofa bit of out of market research though so they could justify they're crack induced direction of the company when they wheren't all messed up on it. As if being to hard to sit on ever stopped a geek from working on a giant computer - I guess the middle Crays we're nice that way though)!
