[Beowulf] [External] Re: old sm/sgi bios

Thu Mar 23 19:08:55 UTC 2023

Yeah, that whole situation was frustrating. From 2004 -2007, I was 
working for a pharmaceutical startup supporting their Computer-Aided 
Drug Discovery (CADD) team. Had I been hired before the director of 
CADD, it would have been a 100% Linux shop. Instead, as soon as he was 
hired he started insisting, and circulated a memo, stating that Linux 
was still a toy for hobbyists and "not ready for primetime" (he used 
that exact quote). So we spent tens of thousands of dollars on two 
Octanes and the 8-way Origin 350. I got a Linux workstation as a 
proof-of-concept, and that HP Workstation running Linux that cost only a 
few thousand dollars ran circles around those SGI boxes, and when cost 
was factored in FLOPS/$ was like 10x better than the SGI hardware at 
that point. And all of that hardware was bought used ("remarketed") from 
SGI, so new hardware would have compared significantly worse in terms of 
value.

Also, it turned out the director of CADD owned a nontrivial amount of 
SGI stocks, so not only was an he over-the-hill curmudgeon afraid of new 
technology, there was also a pretty clear conflict of interest for him 
to be pushing SGI, even though I'm sure our small purchase did nothing 
to improve SGI stock value.

On 3/23/23 2:58 PM, Joe Landman wrote:
>
> They had laid off all the good people doing workstations by then, I 
> think they outsourced design/production to ODMs by that time.  MIP 
> processors were long in the tooth in 1999, never mind 2007.
>
> Having been at SGI from 1995-2001, I can tell you the reason MIPS 
> sucked wind at that point, was the good ship Itanic sunk Alien and 
> Beast processors.  Those design teams left, and we didn't have much 
> for post R10k, other than respins and shrinks of R10k.  Which were 
> renamed R12k, R14k ...
>
> Beast would have been relevant (near EOL though) in 2007.
>
>
> On 3/23/23 14:53, Prentice Bisbal via Beowulf wrote:
>>
>> Between 2003 and 2007, I worked with a lot of O2s, Octanes, an 8-way 
>> Origin 350, and even a Tezro. I don't miss those days.
>>
>> I always felt like the design of their workstations was done by the 
>> same people who design Playskool toys rather than professional hardware.
>>
>> Prentice Bisbal
>> Senior HPC Engineer
>> Computational Sciences Department
>> Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
>> Princeton, NJ
>> https://cs.pppl.gov
>> https://www.pppl.gov
>> On 3/23/23 1:08 PM, Ryan Novosielski via Beowulf wrote:
>>> Seriously. I have an Indy and an Octane2 laying around. That’s not 
>>> even an SGI. :-P
>>>
>>> --
>>> #BlackLivesMatter
>>> ____
>>> || \\UTGERS,  |---------------------------*O*---------------------------
>>> ||_// the State |         Ryan Novosielski - novosirj at rutgers.edu
>>> || \\ University | Sr. Technologist - 973/972.0922 (2x0922) ~*~ 
>>> RBHS Campus
>>> ||  \\    of NJ | Office of Advanced Research Computing - MSB 
>>> A555B, Newark
>>>      `'
>>>
>>>> On Mar 23, 2023, at 13:07, Michael DiDomenico 
>>>> <mdidomenico4 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> ack, irix flashbacks... :) fortunately, this machine isn't quite that
>>>> old, circa 2013
>>>>
>>>> On Thu, Mar 23, 2023 at 1:02 PM Darren Wise via Beowulf
>>>> <beowulf at beowulf.org> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> Hello,
>>>>>
>>>>> I don't personally have such myself but anything SGI even with today's
>>>>> exotics Ians about the most knowledgable I know of globally and
>>>>> seriously dying out within this sector, I hazard a guess your SM board
>>>>> would be considered quite new compared to other systems.
>>>>>
>>>>> http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/sgidepot/
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Kind Regards,
>>>>> Darren Wise
>>>>> Research Engineer, Mechatronics
>>>>> https://wisecorp.co.uk, .us & .ru
>>>>>
>>>>> On 23/03/2023 16:51, Michael DiDomenico wrote:
>>>>>> does anyone happen to have an old sgi / supermicro bios for an
>>>>>> X9DRG-QF+ motherboard squirreled away somewhere?  sgi is long gone,
>>>>>> hpe might have something still but who knows where.  i reached out to
>>>>>> supermicro, but i suspect they'll say no.
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> -- 
> Joe Landman
> e:joe.landman at gmail.com
> t: @hpcjoe
> w:https://scalability.org
> g:https://github.com/joelandman
> l:https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelandman
>
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