SGI: Discussion

http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroo ... /rasc.html

DaSeitz wrote: http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroo ... /rasc.html

Cool!; Now I only need a Prism Deskside to give it a try!

DaSeitz wrote: http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroo ... /rasc.html

-More people seem to have the same idea: http://www.supercomputingonline.com/art ... p?sid=9405

AvS

I'm sure it can provide huge gains to speed-up specialized processing... now, if only could exist a not so expensive way to have one of those systems working, then it could be simply great...

Using a RASC rack is like programming a GPU. Beside running shader programs on it, you could use them a dsp, too.

Geoman wrote: Using a RASC rack is like programming a GPU. Beside running shader programs on it, you could use them a dsp, too.

Yes; I know about GPU and FPGA uses... but I was wondering about something more on the lines of:

http://c64upgra.de/c-one/
http://c64upgra.de/c-one/s_specs.htm

...but with more capacities for real world tasks... I mean... something like the C-One, but with real computing power... can you see my point?

C-One:

profits will soar!!!!




not.....

Diego, is that your new car ? Guess sales of your software must have skyrocketed

Matthias

Brombear wrote: Diego, is that your new car ? Guess sales of your software must have skyrocketed

Matthias

...Not really my own car... But I'll try hard to become your words a true... ...BTW: What actually is a skyrocket is these new Ferrari F430! ...But if at some point I can buy my own, I can promise my own real pictures of that along with a fanfarrious post!

Below a few pictures of the 2004' Edition, but the newer one is even nicer:







...Argh!; Sorry by stealing this thread!

Surprise, surprise, I just ran into a couple of Nallatech guys at a booth in a conference (well actually there were about 10 booths..). Seems like 7 Virtex FPGA's have the power of 60 Xeons, so SGI is going to kick some butt . And watch out for next your when 'Transformer' is coming out, this would be the second non-beta generation, one can at least expect SGI to have the decency to last that long .

And these FPGA-thingies are not SGI-specific, you can also buy cPci, VME, PCI, PCI-X boards. Looks like you can write for this in C, it sure looked nice (no, they weren't serving beer).

roosmcd wrote: Surprise, surprise, I just ran into a couple of Nallatech guys at a booth in a conference (well actually there were about 10 booths..). Seems like 7 Virtex FPGA's have the power of 60 Xeons, so SGI is going to kick some butt .

These is a nice huge amount of computational power on a relatively small footprint! ...Of course you need some custom programming for those little beasts (just my pleasure! ); but I'm sure it worths the efforts, to have the SGI's racks running at the max.

roosmcd wrote: And watch out for next your when 'Transformer' is coming out, this would be the second non-beta generation, one can at least expect SGI to have the decency to last that long .

We hope so!

roosmcd wrote: And these FPGA-thingies are not SGI-specific, you can also buy cPci, VME, PCI, PCI-X boards. Looks like you can write for this in C, it sure looked nice (no, they weren't serving beer).

I've wondered for a second if "PCI" will include at some point IRIX/MIPS as host, to run FPGA collaboration-boards on professional's/hobbyist's SGI workstations...

GeneratriX wrote:

roosmcd wrote: I've wondered for a second if "PCI" will include at some point IRIX/MIPS as host, to run FPGA collaboration-boards on professional's/hobbyist's SGI workstations...

It's just the same as the collaboration between SGI and ARTVPS. One year ago they announced the availability of ARTVPS raytracing chips for SGI Tezro. But I can not remember SGI offering these cards for Tezro.
I think we will not see PCI-FPGA cards for SGI workstations. Eventually for SGI Prism/Altix, but not for IRIX based systems.

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Greetings from Germany

DaSeitz wrote: I think we will not see PCI-FPGA cards for SGI workstations. Eventually for SGI Prism/Altix, but not for IRIX based systems.

Well; I've already Google'd for that a few days ago, and against my guesses, there are already a few of them. The most evident board is the Annapolis Micro Systems WildStar II ...the bad news are that these is a full lenght PCI board that will not fit on my O2
Anyway, I'm sure they will cost a load of money... there are also more FPGA boards on PCI format with support for IRIX over there... just Google for it and you'll find them. Even more... right now I'll write the word 'FPGA' on eBay search to see if any regreted developer has an auction for one of them!

strange thread...

I am working on FPGA from virtex for my thesis and I can tell you one thing: FPGA's are slow and have a bad perfomance/power ratio. Just a good asic goes many times faster.

Virtex high-end fpga's integrate one or more power-pc to get speed!


so why is FPGA interesting? because you can do your custom stuff at a low price. You can program you functions in hardware, you can reconfigure the hardware on your FPGA. Virtex fpga's are essentially a memory.

You need a 11 bit adder ? you need hardware checksumming? You need hardware RGB->HSV conversion?
But beware, your special hardware might still perform a function slower than a high-speed cpu! it really depends on the application.

IIRC you can do all kinds of stuff parallel on a FPGA and the software automatically does this. The Nallatech software (and other software reported) makes it supposedly easy to program the FPGA and to reconfigure it for whatever calculation you want to do. DSP's are also still used.