can you imagine companies spending on insane amount of money on these only to have them become obsolete in 3 years?
SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]
71–80 of 146 posts
Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]
#72We 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.
Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]
#73I 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…
> 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…
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Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]
#74I 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?
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 to develop on workstations that were "ahead of the curve" that way. It gave them an edge, in that they were able to develop future games for hardware that didn't yet exist, but knowing that consumer PCs would eventually catch up.
I think what made these SGI computers really amazing at the time is that there was no such thing as accelerated 3D graphics in the consumer market at the time (or much real-time 3D for that matter). They also had a cool Unix operating system with a UI that was way ahead of anything you could get on a consumer PC. I can also imagine that it was a much much more comfortable development environment than developing on say, MS-DOS, which didn't even have multitasking.
Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]
#75Why is the dude wearing untied board shorts and no shoes? Is that his signature Thing?
Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]
#76The VRML demo at 18 minutes in really took me back: https://youtu.be/Bo3lUw9GUJA?t=18m I remember how convinced some people were that VRML was going to be the future of the Web. 3D graphics in your browser, all coded with a simple markup language! How could it fail? Ultimately it was just too complicated for the average web surfer to navigate, especially in the '90s. For a while, though, it really looked like the vis…
VRML! I wrote a modest amount of VRML by hand in the early '00s. One project was a 3D model of a castle, which i worked on in large part because it was something i could do together with my then-girlfriend - she would describe how the castle should look, and i would code it up. I learned a lot about how to use parametric prototypes, so i had a kit of parts i could rapidly use, to speed up the feedback loop.
I wrote a code called genvrml which converted molecular models from any format (using Babel at the time for conversion) to VRML for display. I converted a bunch of my models for this. I still have them here. And if I dig around, I might even have genvrml as well.
I did believe that this was fairly game changing tech. I showed my 3D models sticking 2m out from a rear projected Reality Wall powered by an IR engine in the Detroit office.
But SGI was beset with inane leadership, and we began our terminal decline mere weeks after I was hired ABD from grad school. I finished up my thesis and developed an autoinstaller code for Irix at the same time. Writing the manuals in LaTeX.
Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]
#77Earlier 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 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 data to nodes didn't take middleware like MPI: you might just do a load and store instruction like on single node. Hardware took care of communications with cache-coherency. You did have to design for good locality to minimize moving data across nodes, though.
Add the other features like reliability (esp hot-swapping), servicability, and security (Trusted IRIX) to have some incredible machines. I always wanted inexpensive hardware with hot-swap, RAID, and something like NUMAlink connecting it. Never quite got that. One company did make a NUMA for AMD and Intel:
Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]
#78I 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?
The company I work for builds machines like that for film post production. I’ve been writing software for one with 8 Titan Xp GPUs, and with its disks arrays and GPU expansion chassis its about the size of an Onyx, and draws considerably more power :-)
Unfortunately I wouldn’t say it feels like the future, more like a normal CentOS Linux desktop.
You’ll struggle to get a PC whose BIOS can handle much more than that too.
We used to build clusters for the same thing in the past, but that was largely standard supercomputing stuff but very similar to how the InfiniteReality machines were used. I believe our software once ran on Onyx machines in the dim & distant past.
So in short I wouldn’t say having loads of GPUs is enough to make it feel futuristic.
Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]
#79I 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…
> The brilliant engineers of SGI soon moved on to become founding members of Nvidia, ATI, Imagination and other graphics tech companies.
It’s called “the University of Silicon Graphics.”
Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]
#80I 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?
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.