SGI: Discussion

No no, £4000 for us here in the UK apparently, $8500 fo you guys!

Still waiting on SGI updating the site to acknowledge the 1GHz R16000 for Tezro that they confirmed is available the other day

Indeed what's kinda funny about that is i had to configure up a laptop from Dell for someone at work and the same machine worked out 500euro (645US) cheaper in Ireland then in US (same configuration etc.!)

Seen that they've just released the "Prism deskside" trying to get a quote for a 1GHz Tezro is gonna be hard, they'll just bombard ye with details on Prism instead

D'Oh, silly me. Which leads me to the next question - where are the PCI-E slots? And why no sound hardware?

Commodore made exactly the same mistake with their A4000 - newer processor and gfx card but built quality and remainder of the components were far inferior to the A3000. History seems to repeat itself again...

Indeed, silly you. Didn't you read this:



Last time I checked, != means "doesn't equal" too. ie, PCI-X != PCI-E means "PCI-X DOESN'T EQUAL PCI-Express"

So pessimistic -- I'm betting Duke Nukem Forever will look sweet under 5dwm

If SGI really wanted to create a 4dwm desktop for Linux, well, they've got the source code -- isn't this what "imake" was designed for?

Does that seem strange to you, too ? Like, SGI has existing customers, right ? So if they came out and said, "We can't compete with Intel anymore 'cuz we're too small, so we're going to go with Itanic or Opteron chips but the underlying guts is gonna be what you're used to, what you depend on, what you've used for years just with a stronger motor" then wouldn't most existing customers go along with the plan ? So if they said that, and built an $8500 Itanic box using really good components that came loaded to the gills with memory, disk space, graphics that actually *worked*, etc etc running what appeared to be the *same* environment that existing customers were used to, the whole plan might make some sense ?

A pretty box with worse-than-Gateway components at four times HP or IBM prices running Gnome, jesus. How can they think that's going to sell ? Oh yeah, bandwidth for geologists .... do you think any of the bigwigs at SGI have ever run a computer ? I know for a fact that their head guy in Beijing cannot even set up Outleak Distress and no one in that office has even heard of Irix ... swell.

t seems like they are so in love with the Linux hoopla that they aren't even aware that they have existing customers. Who in hell is going to leave another brand for SGI under these circumstances ? If they don't keep the customers they have, they won't have anybody . Btw, there's other people in the viz game ....

http://www.supercomputingonline.com/art ... p?sid=8619

Exactly! As an SGI customer, there is very little to motivate me to buy a Prism deskside. It's all off-the-shelf, industry standard stuff. I can buy any number of workstations will similar (or better) specs for much less money. The number $8500 keeps getting thrown around here in this thread. If anybody noticed, the pricing listed for this new deskside on SGI.com is "$8500 - $39000". So what does $8500 get me? A single Itanic 1.3ghz and a single FireGL T2? I don't know about anybody else, but that doesn't scream good price/performance ratio to me. How many dual G5s/HPs/Sun Java Workstations/IBM Intellistations/et al could I buy for $39000? Now I'm not meaning to be totally negative here. Hell, I'd buy a Prism for $4000 today. I see no reason to pay such a huge premium for a workstation that isn't any more "special" than the competition, though.

I'm sure this deskside has its niche, but as hamei says, this won't even retain all of SGIs existing customers, let alone build their customer base. Who am I to judge though.....best of luck SGI!

Having had the unpleasant experience of running a dual itanic in my basement I can confirm that the heat produced is close to nonsense.
The machine will require a dedicated air conditioner or you'll find the room to be too hot even in winter with limited additional heating... and the computer likely shutting down to preserve integrity!
Noise is directly proportionate to the heat produced.
At the moment I really don't feel the personal urgency to move to itanium and for sure I'll not have a machine 24x7 at home.
BTW seemed quite responsive, but not really ready for office time. I'm told that with oracle it really shines.

Marco/Sat

Note: My opinions are mine and not those of my employer!

Yup, totally agree. Visited my Colleague at Aerospace Engineering Faculty last Wednesday, and he showed me his 12P ringrouted 6 module Altux 350 in that uglee Yellow cabinet. The heated air coming out of the back was astounding, close to 40 degrees celsius! If the air is so hot there, imagine what is must be like on the dies themselves.

Nope, no Itanic near anybody's desk, if it's my call...

I was watching a video on SGIs site the other day, shows a dude walking down one of the rows of Columbia, down the back of two rows of machines. Can you imagine how hot it must be behind there then? When you've got a rack either side of you, blasting hot air straight onto you as you walk by? I hope they got good air-con!

I don't know if you made a typing error since letters "i" and "u" are right by each other on the keyboard, but that's one hell great new word:

Altix -> Al(tux)

Well, the Bx2 models have the heat exchanger built into the back of the rack door just for that reason - dump the heat into a chilled water loop before it bakes the finish off the floor tiles...

well, so SGI comes out with a computer running a free OS starting at $ 8,500 and it come cost as much as $ 40,000 using a chip that won;t exist in less than 2 years, i don;t know about the rest of you, but that doesn;t sound like a very good deal to me.


Best to Luck to SGI, but they are just putting more nails in their coffin.

well, I happened to look at a sgi periodic table for '01, and I'll be darned. I'd forgotten that SGI'd already done exactly this (except their 750 workstation used a HP/intel northbridge, and now it's using a sgi asic)...

733MHz Itanium with 2 MB L2 ati gfx $15,500
interesting I thought.

no doubt, gene has the max peak but nobody denied that.
anyhow it does not mean that the gene is the 'best' machine.

The thing about the Blue Gene is that it offers a density of computation that is very very very hard to beat. Both Columbia and Blue Gene are geared towards similar algorithms, so there is no clear design win from Columbia's more flexible communication/memory hierarchy in each of the members of the cluster when it comes to compare it against BlueGene.

In any case, Blue Gene L provides 100+ Tflops in less space than columbia

Not all algorithms are the same. Not every problem can be divided into small bits for MPI to shuffle around. Or not every one has the man/hours to divide a problem into small bits.

Another adventage for the Altix is the overall memory. Columbia has 20TB of RAM compared to 8TB for the Blue Gene (it's not publisized, but you can add it up, 512MB/node, 2CPU/node 32768 CPUs). And Columbia is no where maxed out, by putting the maximum density RAM, you could go 24 times the RAM.

Everything is relative on what you want to do with you supercomputer.

The thing is that both Columbia and Blue Gene L are both used as large clusters, under algorithms that are fairly embarrasingly parallel so their algorithmic use is fairly similar. Memory wise, Blue Gene L has actually 16+TB of RAM, you also need to account for the I/O nodes.

I don't like the chocolate Pop-Tarts. The strawberry ones are better.