SGI: Discussion

I was just gonna say - they jacked up the drive sleds and drove a new computer under it

Pretty crappy, actually. Kind of like sticking Marilyn Monroe's bra onto some girl they met down at rehab and hoping everybody will fall for it.

Said it before, say it again, Yawn ! Nothing spectacular about another wintel/linsux box.

I completely agree with you that it looks boring compared to a real SGI system (as any mass-produced x86 server system will - to compete in that market requires cutting cost and not doing anything flashy). On the other hand, in the interest of pedantry and being a pain, I will point out that the Nehalem microarchitecture CPUs with QPI and every AMD CPU since K8 (HyperTransport) are a ccNUMA architecture - they have CPU-local memory and are linked via an interconnect bus topology that introduces variable latency when accessing remote processor memory. Not many people have exploited it to do single-system-image beyond one enclosure like old/real SGI systems, but the possibility is there and the fundamental idea is similar.

QPI does not scale beyond a single board. you may spend the money to do the design work to make connectors and cables capable of doing it electrically, but the QPI protocol does not withstand a HW fault in the interconnect or processor end points. you can't even hot-plug it.

SGI/IRIX ccNUMA also added a bunch of high level memory/fabric operations for atomicity, barrier synchronization, and remote execution that HT and QPI are only primitive by comparison.

the sweet spot for intel design is the 'couple of sockets'. eight socket topology is the most i've seen for QPI. ultraviolet scales to 32k sockets. fwiw UV only uses numalink between boards, QPI is used between sockets on the same card. the ccnuma of UV is provided by numalink is an extension of QPI.

(EDIT: I'd assumed any chat would be in the hw section, my goof!)

A friend informed me SGI's announced the Origin400 , a blade server clearly from the Rackable camp.
I doubt the name will please many here, but then being able to make use of the IP in this way is no
doubt partly why Rackable bought SGI. If it works and helps the development of other stuff, then good.
Only time will tell I suppose.

SGI's also announced support for all relevant products of the new 6-core XEON 5600 (Nehalem).
I assume this at least means the shared-memory UV system can now use the 6-core chip, which
when paired with Quadro FX cards should make for a pretty hefty beast by modern standards. But
where are the benchmarks, SGI? Enquiring minds wish to know...

Ian.

There's already a lively discussion about it here:
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=16723017

as noted in the other thread, it's just a crappy rebadged intel server. way to bastardize the hallowed name of Origin. what's next? Indigo? Indy?

maybe we'll get the fabled Indy2! a crappy desktop with 'sgi' scrawled on it

or finally that suitcase Indy; a crappy laptop with 'sgi' scrawled on it.

see the pattern yet?

Topics merged.

Why would someone bother licensing? Didn't Intel run off with "Extreme Graphics" and "vPro" for free?

Little bullies have to pay. Bigger bullies get the free ride. You know, "We need rich people to give jobs to the poor people."

*closes the curtains so nobody sees that he owns an SGI*
This is humiliating.

If they make a product under the name O2 or any of its variations, I will officially be more angry!

As industrial design student, in one of the workshops our Carrer Director showed in his presentation class (to my surprise) a Silicon Graphics O2!
As an example of equipment design, not only for its formal beauty (personally I think is the best desktop achieved in history) but throughout the full operational, maintenance, and disassembly.

It's very complex trying to explain to someone who did not have the possibility of using silicon, the added value of SGI had, besides the speed and reliability.

ah, yes the O3!

i'm taking bets now! time to start a poll: http://forums.nekochan.net/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=16723039

News on TheRegister.com this week also hints of AMD's tier 1 customers (HP, Dell, IBM, Oracle) getting their hands on the new 12-core Opteron shortly.... that's going to mean a huge amount of processing power in a single 2 or 4 socket server. That and the 6-core Xeon's must be going at least some way to negate the argument for the traditional big, shared image systems.

aka, "The Ozone."

Are you sure it won't be an O III ?

Not wishing to entirely derail the topic, but, err, yes, that's the basis of a market economy - those with money are called customers. It is no less noble to build Rolls Royce cars or Sony Vaios than it is to build VWs or Dell Inspirons. In fact "the rich" traditionally have helped to keep the more beautiful, and difficult, crafts alive by virtue of creating demand.

There really is no utopian ideal of even-close-to-equality and, frankly, nor should there be - humans are not alike in ability, aptitude, or - frankly, brutally, but honestly - value to each other or to society as a whole. That doesn't detract from their fundamental rights as humans, nor prevent them from making valid and often huge contributions to society, but neither does it provide a justification for the dull hand of "levelling".

Every conceivable model of society relies upon this differentiation in ability; if not rich vs poor then intelligent vs less so, or strong vs weak, or fertile vs barren, and so on. There will be division, and society does in fact need people at all strata in order to function properly.

So, in the context of a market economy, we do, in fact, need the rich in order to provide (some of the) jobs for the poor!

Of course, as SGI's history shows us, being rich and remaining rich are 2 very different things. To paraphrase an age-old quote, SGI is the prime example of "if you want to make a small fortune in the computer business, start with a large fortune"

AH HAHAHA.

That is amazing. I completely forget this thing even existed over just a months time until you revived this thread. Wow. Just goes to show how uneventful the release actually was.

Reminds me of my post from nearly 6 years ago!

http://forums.nekochan.net/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=4282&p=33015&hilit=ozone#p33015

Sorry but you do not understand a "market economy" in the slightest. The wealthy do not do shit to advance an economy. They are pretty much parasites. There will always be the wealthy and they do provide nice decorations but almost ALL advances come from the middle class.

Wealthy people and companies do not create anything new : they manipulate whatever comes along to provide the maximum profit for themselves and kill anything that interferes with their own selfish desires in the process. It's the middle class which is the "market economy." Crush the middle class and you get Mexico or China or India.

Please, people, use your own brains and eyes instead of just regurgitating the swill you've been fed by the CEO's and Wall Street brokers.