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SGI switching to Linux


dexter11
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Wel this was my job for a long time

http://www.sgi.com/products/visualization/realitycenter/

 

Quite honestly linux isn't ready to do this. IRIX has so much built in at a harware level... the MIPS chips are lousy at interger calc's but very good at 3D...

 

Its not like you can take a top of the range IBM Power 5 and replace the SGI's...

 

SGI has actually supported OpenSource for a long time, most of the 3d stuff is directly released from SGI sponsored openGL...

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It was in the air. Since their massive losses they didn't have a choice. If you look at the comments on the OSnews site you can see noone denies that the MIPS machines are technically superior. But I think that superiority comes with a huge price.

True but for many of their customers the price is irrelevant.

Just building a visualisation room costs a small fortune.

 

Their problem was IMHO partly buying Cray.

MIPS machines are not good super computers. Power4 and now 5 beats them hands down on calculations and the MIPs are not really much better than todays top of the range pentium dual cores for raw calc power.

 

What made them so superior in visualisation is their graphic rendering abilty in combination with the switched Mobo which on the high end Onxy gives a huge backpane bandwidth (no figures but hundreds of Gb/sec)

 

Their real problem is that the visualisations also require a lot of background calculation and the MIPS arch doesn't really help out.

 

This led a lot of companies too use mixed arch... some SGI and some IBM for super computers and Intel or Sun for everyday work. Strangely enough linux was also a nail in the coffin... in enabling cheap Intel arch's to do the background stuff so that the cost of maintaining the systems as opposed to the systems themselves became prohibitive, largely to to outsourcing IT support... (for instance if you outsource IT to a Sun vendor they squeeze out the SGI's)

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Strangely enough linux was also a nail in the coffin...

That's not so strange. Linux is killing the commercial UNIXes. Slowly but surely.

Yes but in this way its actually killing the architecture.

 

The low level stuff in IRIX is very arch specific .. for instance the visualisation clusters have huge (TB) amounts of memory and the CPU's share this memory and access it byte by byte.. nothing like an X86 type mobo.

 

The whole thing is designed more like an old mainframe with a lot of throughput instead of raw speed so its more like ferrying data through it in huge semi artic's not fast motorbikes if that makes sense.

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Thanks Gowater.

I worked a lot as a user with video rendering, and later as an engineer building simulators, such as airport-tower simulators used for flight-engineer training. Every movement on the airport was visualized seemlessly on the (fake) tower-windows, and imagine all the acoustics on top of that. Never understood much of what was going on inside the boxes though, just calculated and built the horizons (rear projections) with mirrors and beamers, etc. Now I understand more of what was going on. Thanks!

We also saw modified NVIDIA drivers being used to process the video being beamed onto cylindrical, conical, or-what-else surfaces. The video does not just have to be pre-distorted to look correct on whatever shape it is beamed onto, but also has to be modified so that the focus is correct. If you look at huge projections onto statues, tall buildings, cylinders, cones, spheres, footballs, etc., you know what I mean... Anyway, thanks for the insight!

Helmut

Edited by Helmut
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