So what would be the modern-day equivalent to this machine?
SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]
91–100 of 146 posts
Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]
#92Why is the dude wearing untied board shorts and no shoes? Is that his signature Thing?
It's traditional in some parts of Canadia.
Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]
#93I 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?
You could but it's unlikely to impress as much - some fundamental transitions only happen once. I think in this case the big advance is realtime 3d graphics with lighting and texture mapping. Perhaps a really fancy VR setup might have a similar effect although to me, it's less obvious that VR will be something every computer has, the way it seemed obvious that 3d graphics is something every computer will get much better at, in the early 90s.
Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]
#94I 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.
Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]
#95The true victory and underappreciated skill of first world country is in their scalability to earn profit from massively overpriced machines.
Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]
#96I 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…
Links? I loved Neuromancer, Snow Crash and others of the time.
Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]
#97I 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.
10000% agree. Either sell it or even better, donate it to a computer history museum somewhere.
Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]
#98Years ago, Weird Stuff Warehouse (R.I.P.) had a shell of the larger closet-sized Onyx system sitting in the back, and I always thought it would be fun to do something with it, but couldn't think of anything. With a shell of a Cray, you could at least make a couch out of it...
It’s possible that was my old machine. I donated a lot of old SGI hardware to Weird Stuff in 2008-2009 before moving from SV up to SF.
Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]
#99Earlier 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…
> 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.
Re: SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 – Onyx RealityEngine² [video]
#100Flashback 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 was the systems engineer for SGI mainly to McDonnell-Douglas in St. Louis in 1992 for their flight simulators. If you think what you saw was something ...
I'm sure my early teen eyes saw only a glimpse. The one I was shown was designed for the Israeli air force. This was the closest I got to sit in an F-16 cockpit, and the closest I got to super computing power even films couldn't show me at the time. I do however remember them totting the 250K price tag.