Live data from Hacker News

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

youtube.com

81–90 of 146 posts

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

#81
post #46

Man, this brings back memories. I still have an O2 and an Octane system in storage. Been meaning to take them out and set them up again at some point. My father was generous enough to give me an O2 in the late 90s so I could learn 3D graphics, since I was interested in making special effects for movies. We didn’t have any software then but found this thing called Blender which was available for free and worked on IRI…

:-) I have a fully working O2 setup somwehere in the attic. Could not get myself to get rid of it. Also have an Indy that won't boot up.

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

#83

I had the fun of using this system when I was doing my undergraduate thesis. I had done some protein modelling work and ran straight into the problem that there was no way to get the beautiful models into my thesis - we had no printer. I came up with what I thought was the genius idea of photographing the monitor, the problem was the CRT screen was so curved my models were all distorted. I ended up wheeling the whole…

I love this story, great digital to analog conversion.

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

#84
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…

> 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.

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

#85
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?

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 the FPGAs with ASICs

5) build a box with 16-64 of everything.

I would avoid polygons, since the current architectures are all extremely good at filling polygons. SDFs and raytracing are where you may find the “not on current gen” problems.

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

#86

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.

Well, if you look at any form of interactive 3D multiplayer game, it really is here, it's just that there's so much to pull apart, in terms of the nuance of online interaction with humans, that we're reluctant to move beyond the cartoonish worlds of video gaming.

We have tons of really popular game titles, and millions of people playing or watching or chatting, as tournaments unfold. We fill convention centers with people playing games, and stream a webcam feed of people at conventions playing the games. But it's all still games, world of warcraft, fortnite, minecraft, eve online.

So, what if it wasn't a game? What if it was more than video conferencing? What if there was more going on, and an immersive system of interaction closer to first person gaming engine was as relevant, in social terms as facebook, twitter, bitcoin, uber, amazon, google, github, along with email, chat, and file sharing, all as a single service?

What if all your home automation and mobile devices were integrated? What if it gave your GPS location to the world, and authenticated you selectively as context sensitive pseudonyms, or conversely your authentic legal identity, securely and as preferred?

How much of that is possible? And how much of it do we actually want? But most of all, if corporations collaborating with governments, or an open community of enthusiasts, put this in your hands, would you trust it? Would you put all your eggs in one basket like that?

How many IP addresses would a system like this require, to keep each context secure from another, to preserve pseudonyms, and not leak GPS location information? What about background audio, and geolocation by timing attacks? Plus the basics of platform security, knowing what we see every day in terms of zero days getting dropped, and leaving people out in the open?

It's cool to think about, but our technology as it exists, is a drafty outhouse, compared to the brick shithouse we really need.

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

#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.

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

#88

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.

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.

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

#89
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

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

#90
Could anyone use an SGI Indigo 2 Impact (the purple one)? I've got one in Slovenia, ready to part with it for 100€ + shipping. My mother threw away the screen, keyboard and mouse (thinking I won't need them), so it's just sitting around. The box is still fully operational, with Photoshop for Irix installed.
Post reply on HN