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SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]

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Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]

#121

Post by jamesfmilne »

a1369209993 wrote: post #99
erikpukinskis wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would approach it like this: 1) find some graphics problems which people say are not possible on any near-term hardware 2) study the algorithms and identify low level calculations which, if you could do orders of magnitude more of them, would allow you to solve the problem. 3) get a bunch of FPGAs and try to design a machine which can (very slowly) run that architecture 4) once you’ve got it working, slowly replace…

> SDFs and raytracing An easy one would be: have each GPU raytrace a (say) 320x240 scene, each offset by fractions-of-a-pixel[0] or multiples-of-a-screen from each other, then have a final GPU stitch them together into a full-res video. 0: If you this with 60x1080 resolution, you might be able to replace the final GPU with a dumb hardware multiplexer, though that would make compositing painful at best.

That’s literally what we used to do for our cluster colour grading systems for films.

We had hardware that the would merge DVI from up to 8 GPUs, in separate nodes, and produce a single image.

Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]

#122

Post by pasabagi »

matt2000 wrote: post #88
octorian wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As others have said, the whole point of these machines is that they were NOT simply creative combinations of current high-end commodity products. The whole system architecture, from the CPU, memory, I/O, to the graphics hardware, was custom designed. That's something you really don't see very much of these days.

Not in PCs, but I wonder if the iPhone would count as a largely custom designed computer. They do custom silicon for a lot of the system, and get much higher performance than commodity phones as a result. Perhaps the spiritual successor to these high end workstations in an odd way.

I think Linus mentioned something along those lines: on how the work on using Linux for supercomputers was the foundation of Linux for phones. It's a point Tannenbaum makes in Modern Operating Systems: what is old, is new, and what is new is soon to be old, as the bottlenecks move, ideas that were abandoned get resurrected.

Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]

#123

Post by rys »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #85
AriaMinaei wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if it's still possible to put together hardware that's a few years ahead of current high-end products. Like, can you arrange, say, ten flagship graphic cards for realtime rendering? Do we have game engines that can scale to that number?

I would approach it like this: 1) find some graphics problems which people say are not possible on any near-term hardware 2) study the algorithms and identify low level calculations which, if you could do orders of magnitude more of them, would allow you to solve the problem. 3) get a bunch of FPGAs and try to design a machine which can (very slowly) run that architecture 4) once you’ve got it working, slowly replace…

Take a look at the game Claybook. Fully raytraced visuals at 60fps against a dynamically updated SDF scene representation, complete with fluid sim for the main game mechanics. All on current hardware, including stuff most people consider “slow” these days (Xbox One).

Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]

#124

Post by nailer »

spitfire wrote: post #96
bcaa7f3a8bbc wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To me, having the box sitting next to me every day, with "infinite reality" label on the top reminds me of those days when anything seemed possible and all of it was magical. I miss that sense of wonder and infinite possibilities... In the recent 3-5 years, there is a clear revival of the cyberpunk subculture online. Many related hobbyist websites appeared, many new cyberpunk-inspired independent art, music and gam…

Links? I loved Neuromancer, Snow Crash and others of the time.

Check out Daniel Suarez daemon and freedom. Not saying more as I don't want to spoil anything.

Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]

#125

Post by pandaman »

corysama wrote: post #28

I was very fortunate. This is the machine on which I originally learned OpenGL. It was an undergrad lab job where I was paid $5/hour to eventually write http://paulbourke.net/geometry/polygonise/marchingsource.cpp But, in order to do that I had to learn how to 3D at all. The most fun I had with the machine was playing GlQuake 1 at 1280x1024 on a T1 line and bragging about it on the chat where everyone thought I was l…

>a year later the 3DFX Voodoo 1 would come out and deliver approximately 1/4 the fill rate for 1/1000 the price

You are probably misremembering things. GLQuake came out in 1997, after 3DFX Voodoo in 1996, not the other way around.

Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]

#126

Post by bcaa7f3a8bbc »

spitfire wrote: post #96
bcaa7f3a8bbc wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To me, having the box sitting next to me every day, with "infinite reality" label on the top reminds me of those days when anything seemed possible and all of it was magical. I miss that sense of wonder and infinite possibilities... In the recent 3-5 years, there is a clear revival of the cyberpunk subculture online. Many related hobbyist websites appeared, many new cyberpunk-inspired independent art, music and gam…

Links? I loved Neuromancer, Snow Crash and others of the time.

Another example is Neocities, the old 90s Geocities personal webpage culture brought to life again.

Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]

#127

Post by bcaa7f3a8bbc »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #84
bcaa7f3a8bbc wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To me, having the box sitting next to me every day, with "infinite reality" label on the top reminds me of those days when anything seemed possible and all of it was magical. I miss that sense of wonder and infinite possibilities... In the recent 3-5 years, there is a clear revival of the cyberpunk subculture online. Many related hobbyist websites appeared, many new cyberpunk-inspired independent art, music and gam…

It’s coming. Birthing something like that requires patience. And it always takes longer than you think. It will come slowly at first, and then all at once.

>The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.

Nobody is denying it, indeed we see many related development.

However, it's not only about "the lost future that never comes", I think it's also due to the people being increasingly alienated about the current state of computing. Primarily, it's about the lost mentality of the future.

Cyberpunk promised a future where computing is the disruptive technology. Since 2006, the ever-increasing clock speed came to a halt. Since 2013, the general performance of Intel processors remained constant. Selling of PCs keeps declining. No major breakthrough in practical operating systems are made beyond Unix (http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf).

Cyberpunk promised a future where megacorps and governments being increasingly oppressive to the population with technology, it has occurred as predicted. Cyberpunk also promised the "cyberspace" is going to be the electronic frontier where technologists reclaimed liberty... Today, the damn web browser that runs all the craps written in Electron and JavaScript is hardly the "frontier", neither Facebook, Twitter and the endless timeline of buzz, which constitute 90% of the Internet activities count. Also, from 2000-2013, decentralization was killed, not built. Move importantly, today, we don’t even know how to waste time on the Internet anymore (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17068138). Though, It, still, has arguably occurred to some extents too, but progressed slowly, even the basic tech like HTTPS was only deployed after Snowden.

A future where anything seemed possible and all of it was magical is definitely gone. But the new generation of developers, armed with decentralization, P2P, cryptography, and trustless system, no matter if it's going to be successful or not, would bring the Internet back to its cyberpunk ideals, revive the dream and set the history forward.

Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]

#128

Post by spitfire »

deerpig wrote: post #54

I have a slightly newer Infinite Reality R10000 sitting beside my desk here in Phnom Penh. A professor in Berkeley gave it to us and somehow we managed to get it to this side of the world. It uses enough power to run an apartment block and yes it is noisy. I will eventually gut it and install a six node linux cluster inside. I used these boxes in Hong Kong in the early 90's, then later in Japan in the late 90's for a…

Do you have contact information?

Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]

#129

Post by jonhendry18 »

narrator wrote: post #55
mattlondon wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also have fond memories of marveling at VRML scenes on TV when my computer and dialup internet connection weren't really ready to experience it. Thanks for the link to A-Frame though! This looks great - I am loving the declarative nature of it, and the scene-inspector seems like a really useful tool.

Virtual Reality is so weird. It's a future that never really got here. Even now that the tech has caught up, it still just doesn't get a lot of enthusiasm from the market.

Part of it is that interfaces that require "walking" through a space or looking around for things in a 3D space are terrible if there's no inherent justification for the movement (as there is in a game of exploration).

I don't want to have to navigate a space in order to find something. Navigating space is a limitation of physical objects; replicating it in an online environment is an error. It's like if automobiles were designed so that steering and speed were controlled with reins.

Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]

#130

Post by mveety »

harel wrote: post #32

Flashback scene begins. When I was much younger my dad (who has a print business) was tasked with printing panels for F16 jet fighter pilot cockpit to be used in a simulator of the aircraft. The simulator was developed by a private company. One Saturday he took me to their office. They had one of these and gave me a demo of it. Until then all I knew was of standard consumer computers (commodore, pc, macs etc) . In an…

I remember seeing Boeing's simulator at their factory in the early 2000's that was powered by a room filled with SGI machines running the graphics, controlling the hydraulics, and lying to the avionics. It totally blew me away.
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