[Beowulf] [External] Re: old sm/sgi bios

Thu Mar 23 20:48:12 UTC 2023

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..

On 23/03/2023 19:08, 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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