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

Fri Mar 24 06:34:20 UTC 2023

That Supermicro board sounds like one of the boards from an ICE cluster,
right?
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?

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
We got the new dSGI x86 workstations - superbly engineered of course.
However they had a low voltage PCI slot setup which meant you could not use
normal off the shelf (read cheap) PCI cards
Clearly SGI made that decision from an engineering viewpoint - there must
be an advantage with low voltage.
Sadly those workstations really could not compete in price terms  with
commodity models such as Compaq

On Thu, 23 Mar 2023 at 22:13, Prentice Bisbal via Beowulf <
beowulf at beowulf.org> wrote:

> 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.
>
> 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 useless, outdated computer hardware.
>
> 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?)
>
> --
> Prentice
>
> On 3/23/23 4:48 PM, Darren Wise via Beowulf wrote:
>
> 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, NJhttps://cs.pppl.govhttps://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>
> <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> <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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> --
> 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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