[Beowulf] [External] Re: old sm/sgi bios
Joe Landman
joe.landman at gmail.com
Thu Mar 23 19:16:06 UTC 2023
I remember in 1999/2000 I did a simple BLAST benchmark on my SGI Pentium
workstation running linux, and one on my R10k box. Similar clock
speeds. Pentium was 2x faster in Int heavy calcs. Did similar things
with FP, and discussed the results with my team and engineering.
None of them were happy.
I left SGI in 2001, after a discussion with the SVP of engineering,
Warren Pratt, who insisted that the future was not linux clusters, but
large beefy many cpu shared memory servers. I put my money/future where
my mouth was.
Today, I run on rackmount 1 and 2U boxes containing 80-128 CPU (cores),
and 2TB physical ram.
So yeah. He was right.
But they run linux, and are x86_64 arch.
On 3/23/23 15:08, Prentice Bisbal via Beowulf wrote:
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> On 3/23/23 2:58 PM, Joe Landman wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> 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 ...
>>
>> Beast would have been relevant (near EOL though) in 2007.
>>
>>
>> On 3/23/23 14:53, Prentice Bisbal via Beowulf wrote:
>>>
>>> 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.
>>>
>>> I always felt like the design of their workstations was done by the
>>> same people who design Playskool toys rather than professional
>>> hardware.
>>>
>>> Prentice Bisbal
>>> Senior HPC Engineer
>>> Computational Sciences Department
>>> Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
>>> Princeton, NJ
>>> https://cs.pppl.gov
>>> https://www.pppl.gov
>>> On 3/23/23 1:08 PM, Ryan Novosielski via Beowulf wrote:
>>>> Seriously. I have an Indy and an Octane2 laying around. That’s not
>>>> even an SGI. :-P
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> #BlackLivesMatter
>>>> ____
>>>> || \\UTGERS,
>>>> |---------------------------*O*---------------------------
>>>> ||_// the State | Ryan Novosielski - novosirj at rutgers.edu
>>>> || \\ University | Sr. Technologist - 973/972.0922 (2x0922) ~*~
>>>> RBHS Campus
>>>> || \\ of NJ | Office of Advanced Research Computing - MSB
>>>> A555B, Newark
>>>> `'
>>>>
>>>>> On Mar 23, 2023, at 13:07, Michael DiDomenico
>>>>> <mdidomenico4 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> ack, irix flashbacks... :) fortunately, this machine isn't quite that
>>>>> old, circa 2013
>>>>>
>>>>> On Thu, Mar 23, 2023 at 1:02 PM Darren Wise via Beowulf
>>>>> <beowulf at beowulf.org> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Hello,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I don't personally have such myself but anything SGI even with
>>>>>> today's
>>>>>> exotics Ians about the most knowledgable I know of globally and
>>>>>> seriously dying out within this sector, I hazard a guess your SM
>>>>>> board
>>>>>> would be considered quite new compared to other systems.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/sgidepot/
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Kind Regards,
>>>>>> Darren Wise
>>>>>> Research Engineer, Mechatronics
>>>>>> https://wisecorp.co.uk, .us & .ru
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On 23/03/2023 16:51, Michael DiDomenico wrote:
>>>>>>> does anyone happen to have an old sgi / supermicro bios for an
>>>>>>> X9DRG-QF+ motherboard squirreled away somewhere? sgi is long gone,
>>>>>>> hpe might have something still but who knows where. i reached
>>>>>>> out to
>>>>>>> supermicro, but i suspect they'll say no.
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>>>>
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>> --
>> Joe Landman
>> e:joe.landman at gmail.com
>> t: @hpcjoe
>> w:https://scalability.org
>> g:https://github.com/joelandman
>> l:https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelandman
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>
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--
Joe Landman
e:joe.landman at gmail.com
t: @hpcjoe
w:https://scalability.org
g:https://github.com/joelandman
l:https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelandman
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