<div dir="ltr">That Supermicro board sounds like one of the boards from an ICE cluster, right?<div>I know Joe flagged up the BIOS - thinking out loud is it not possible to copy the BIOS from another, working, board of the same model?</div><div><br></div><div>Regarding SGI workstations when I worked in post production at Framestore we had lots of SGI big beats - including O2000 and I think an O3000</div><div>We got the new dSGI x86 workstations - superbly engineered of course.</div><div>However they had a low voltage PCI slot setup which meant you could not use normal off the shelf (read cheap) PCI cards</div><div>Clearly SGI made that decision from an engineering viewpoint - there must be an advantage with low voltage.</div><div>Sadly those workstations really could not compete in price terms with commodity models such as Compaq</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Thu, 23 Mar 2023 at 22:13, Prentice Bisbal via Beowulf <<a href="mailto:beowulf@beowulf.org">beowulf@beowulf.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
<div>
<p>Mentioning it to him was pointless. You know the serenity prayer?
Well, I had the serenity to accept that his backwards attitude was
something I could not change, so it was just a source of
entertainment for me. <br>
</p>
<p>I did share my experience with my boss, who was the best boss
ever, and she was like "Yeah, I figured". That director of CADD
talked a lot of game, but he couldn't walk the talk and was
eventually let go, but not until he drove me out of the company,
and cost them a lot of money in useless, outdated computer
hardware. <br>
</p>
<p>I do have to say it did inspire me to name my Linux workstation
"underdog", which was one of my favorite hostnames I've come up
with ("bobblehead" being my all time favorite - honestly is there
any better task for a system admin than coming up with good
hostnames?) <br>
</p>
<p>--<br>
Prentice<br>
</p>
<pre cols="72"></pre>
<div>On 3/23/23 4:48 PM, Darren Wise via
Beowulf wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite">
<p>I nearly dropped my coffee lol, did you make note & record
his face if you ever did in past tense mention such by chance
the comparisons? -I'm just curious with wonder..<br>
</p>
<div>On 23/03/2023 19:08, Prentice Bisbal
via Beowulf wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite">
<p>Yeah, that whole situation was frustrating. From 2004 -2007,
I was working for a pharmaceutical startup supporting their
Computer-Aided Drug Discovery (CADD) team. Had I been hired
before the director of CADD, it would have been a 100% Linux
shop. Instead, as soon as he was hired he started insisting,
and circulated a memo, stating that Linux was still a toy for
hobbyists and "not ready for primetime" (he used that exact
quote). So we spent tens of thousands of dollars on two
Octanes and the 8-way Origin 350. I got a Linux workstation as
a proof-of-concept, and that HP Workstation running Linux that
cost only a few thousand dollars ran circles around those SGI
boxes, and when cost was factored in FLOPS/$ was like 10x
better than the SGI hardware at that point. And all of that
hardware was bought used ("remarketed") from SGI, so new
hardware would have compared significantly worse in terms of
value. <br>
</p>
<p>Also, it turned out the director of CADD owned a nontrivial
amount of SGI stocks, so not only was an he over-the-hill
curmudgeon afraid of new technology, there was also a pretty
clear conflict of interest for him to be pushing SGI, even
though I'm sure our small purchase did nothing to improve SGI
stock value. <br>
</p>
<div>On 3/23/23 2:58 PM, Joe Landman
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite">
<p>They had laid off all the good people doing workstations by
then, I think they outsourced design/production to ODMs by
that time. MIP processors were long in the tooth in 1999,
never mind 2007.</p>
<p>Having been at SGI from 1995-2001, I can tell you the
reason MIPS sucked wind at that point, was the good ship
Itanic sunk Alien and Beast processors. Those design teams
left, and we didn't have much for post R10k, other than
respins and shrinks of R10k. Which were renamed R12k, R14k
...</p>
<p>Beast would have been relevant (near EOL though) in 2007.
<br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<div>On 3/23/23 14:53, Prentice Bisbal
via Beowulf wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite">
<p>Between 2003 and 2007, I worked with a lot of O2s,
Octanes, an 8-way Origin 350, and even a Tezro. I don't
miss those days. <br>
</p>
<p>I always felt like the design of their workstations was
done by the same people who design Playskool toys rather
than professional hardware. <br>
</p>
<pre cols="72">Prentice Bisbal
Senior HPC Engineer
Computational Sciences Department
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
Princeton, NJ
<a href="https://cs.pppl.gov" target="_blank">https://cs.pppl.gov</a>
<a href="https://www.pppl.gov" target="_blank">https://www.pppl.gov</a></pre>
<div>On 3/23/23 1:08 PM, Ryan
Novosielski via Beowulf wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite">
Seriously. I have an Indy and an Octane2 laying around.
That’s not even an SGI. :-P
<div><br>
<div>
<div dir="auto" style="color:rgb(0,0,0);letter-spacing:normal;text-align:start;text-indent:0px;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;word-spacing:0px;text-decoration:none">
<div style="color:rgb(0,0,0);letter-spacing:normal;text-align:start;text-indent:0px;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;word-spacing:0px"> --<br>
#BlackLivesMatter</div>
<div style="color:rgb(0,0,0);letter-spacing:normal;text-align:start;text-indent:0px;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;word-spacing:0px"> ____<br>
|| \\UTGERS, <span style="white-space:pre-wrap"> </span> |---------------------------*O*---------------------------<br>
||_// the State<span style="white-space:pre-wrap"> </span> |
Ryan Novosielski - <a href="mailto:novosirj@rutgers.edu" target="_blank">novosirj@rutgers.edu</a><br>
|| \\ University | Sr. Technologist - 973/972.0922
(2x0922) ~*~ RBHS Campus<br>
|| \\ of NJ<span style="white-space:pre-wrap"> </span> |
Office of Advanced Research Computing - MSB
A555B, Newark<br>
`'</div>
</div>
</div>
<div><br>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div>On Mar 23, 2023, at 13:07, Michael DiDomenico <a href="mailto:mdidomenico4@gmail.com" target="_blank"><mdidomenico4@gmail.com></a>
wrote:</div>
<br>
<div>
<div>ack, irix flashbacks... :) fortunately, this
machine isn't quite that<br>
old, circa 2013<br>
<br>
On Thu, Mar 23, 2023 at 1:02 PM Darren Wise via
Beowulf<br>
<a href="mailto:beowulf@beowulf.org" target="_blank"><beowulf@beowulf.org></a>
wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite"><br>
Hello,<br>
<br>
I don't personally have such myself but
anything SGI even with today's<br>
exotics Ians about the most knowledgable I
know of globally and<br>
seriously dying out within this sector, I
hazard a guess your SM board<br>
would be considered quite new compared to
other systems.<br>
<br>
<a href="http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/sgidepot/" target="_blank">http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/sgidepot/</a><br>
<br>
<br>
Kind Regards,<br>
Darren Wise<br>
Research Engineer, Mechatronics<br>
<a href="https://wisecorp.co.uk" target="_blank">https://wisecorp.co.uk</a>,
.us & .ru<br>
<br>
On 23/03/2023 16:51, Michael DiDomenico wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite">does anyone happen to
have an old sgi / supermicro bios for an<br>
X9DRG-QF+ motherboard squirreled away
somewhere? sgi is long gone,<br>
hpe might have something still but who knows
where. i reached out to<br>
supermicro, but i suspect they'll say no.<br>
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<pre cols="72">--
Joe Landman
e: <a href="mailto:joe.landman@gmail.com" target="_blank">joe.landman@gmail.com</a>
t: @hpcjoe
w: <a href="https://scalability.org" target="_blank">https://scalability.org</a>
g: <a href="https://github.com/joelandman" target="_blank">https://github.com/joelandman</a>
l: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelandman" target="_blank">https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelandman</a></pre>
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