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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]

#131

Post by axilmar »

dodoid wrote: post #89
mattl wrote: post #18

This looks good. A previous video on this channel said there was no WWW in 1993 and I stopped following things. Have things improved?

Hi there! I am Dodoid, the creator of this video. Created an account here to ask you this. Where did I make that mistake? I'm fully aware that there was a world-wide-web in 1993, and if I made the mistake of saying that there was not, I have a post-release correction system and can add a correction to the video. Anyway, I hope things have improved. Thanks for the interest, -Dodoid

Thanks for the awesome video!!!!

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

#132

Post by Annatar »

spilk wrote: post #94
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…

please don't gut rare vintage hardware to install commodity x86 hardware.

Yes, please don't do it, for no primitive intel-based system has ever come close to any SGI hardware in terms of elegance. It would be a sacrilege.

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

#133

Post by Annatar »

Had the server version of this system as my private server in my basement at home; the electricity bill was peppery.

I must have torn it apart and put it back together about ten times, studying the hardware, and must have installed IRIX 6.5.30 on it just as many.

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

#134

Post by Annatar »

uptown wrote: post #4

I used these in the computer lab at RPI back in the 90s to do 3D animation. It’s crazy to think how much smaller and faster today’s tech is compared to these behemoths.

And yet, this smaller tech comes directly from SGI: lots of former SGI hardware engineers ended up at NVIDIA.

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

#135

Post by wowtip »

octorian wrote: post #80
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?

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.

And adding to the magic, SGI machines were a something most people would never get their hands on. A maxed out graphics workstation today is still just an "ordinary PC" but more expensive. A (big) upgrade, but not something with magic dust.

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

#136

Post by whywhywhywhy »

AriaMinaei wrote: post #62
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…

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?

Not quite 10 but here’s a blogpost on making a 7 gpu machine for 3D pathtracing rendering http://tomglimps.com/7_gpu_workstation-1000_octanebench/

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

#137

Post by wowtip »

liftbigweights wrote: post #72

We had these and a few SUN systems in our computer lab storage room. We called them the dinosaurs. It's amazing how things changed from 1993 to mid 2000s. From technology rock stars to useless junk in a little more than a decade. The "lab master" bribed us with pizza to help him clear the storage room. Quickly found out how heavy these things were and what a raw deal we got.

I heard somewhere SGI put a big chunk of iron/lead inside the case to make them heavier and add to the expensive impression when handling the machines.

Not sure if that was the case, or if it is just an urban legend?

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

#138

Post by tachyonbeam »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #77
tachyonbeam wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't most software can scale to 10 GPUs out of the box. AFAIK, it would be hard to even find a motherboard that would fit them. However, a company could conceivably buy a workstation with 256GB RAM, two 32-core Threadripper CPUs and four Nvidia 2080Ti. That would definitely put you a few years ahead of the average "consumer PC" or next-generation console. Sidenote: I've read that John Carmack and id Software liked…

That's a good point but underselling it. My favorite thing about them was doing a single, system image that removed bottlenecks and complexity for developer at the same time. The PC's were using slow or redundant buses to connect high-speed components. SGI removed redundancies, used fast interconnects (GB/s), made them low-latency (microseconds vs milliseconds), and NUMA-enabled them. The last part meant that sending…

I guess that's the difference between a workstation that's designed for performance and versatility before cost, and a PC, which is made to be affordable first. When the PC industry started, it was very much about repurposing whatever low-cost CPUs and off-the-shelf components were available, and finding ways of packaging this into a semi-usable machine for less than $1000. Things have changed quite a bit since, but much of the do-it-cheap rushed-to-market type of compromises are still with us.

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

#139

Post by saltcured »

rasz wrote: post #117
dev_dull wrote: post #87

The scanlines on the CRT monitor reminded me how good the refresh rates were on that hardware back then. How did we move backwards so spectacularly with LCD panels? It’s only now that reasonably priced 144hz monitors are hitting the market.

What good would high refresh LCD do you in 1995-2005? From no acceleration at all to barely being able to run modern games at 40 fps (cod2 on 7800GTX in 2005). CRT need high refresh, because they flash picture content at you. LCD do not flash, they maintain steady picture.

The main reason for 144 Hz refresh back then was not to tame normal CRT flicker. It was to get 72 Hz refresh of a stereoscopic pair. You had to use really fast phosphors to make this work and not have severe blurring/ghosting of the left and right images. Monitors intended for non-stereoscopic use could have slower phosphors which helped reduce the flickering effect at lower refresh rates.

Having this rapid refresh helped give persistence of vision for each eye, where if you had subdivided 72 Hz into 36 Hz cycle rates for a pair, you would have very annoying strobe effects visible to most people.

No application was rendering at 144 Hz. They might be lucky to sustain 20-30 Hz, but the framebuffer held both a left and right image and the video output switched back and forth between them on each frame scan. Complex visualizations often got down to 12 Hz or so and considered that acceptable as people would still perceive motion as in an animated cartoon.

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

#140

Post by theandrewbailey »

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…

ATI was founded in 1985, long before this machine. Maybe you meant ArtX? They eventually got bought by ATI, and later, AMD.
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