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It seems to me that if you wanted a multi head-capable supercomputer in the 90s, SGI is exactly who you would buy from. A rackmount Onyx or Onyx2 could support

by mrpippy 10y ago

It seems to me that if you wanted a multi head-capable supercomputer in the 90s, SGI is exactly who you would buy from. A rackmount Onyx or Onyx2 could support lots of graphics heads, at least 8 CPUs, tons of memory, and it was a fairly normal/popular UNIX. Was there anyone doing this sort of work on Cray machines?

ethomson 10y ago
Yeah, I was a bit surprised reading this, myself. $500k for a Y-MP does seem like a nice price - I assume they were getting a machine that had been previously loaned to someone who was upgrading to something massively multiprocessor. But it seems like the SGI Challenge architecture makes more sense in 1995. An Onyx would be half the price of that Y-MP, with superior graphics. A Power Challenge GR would as performant as the Y-MP, again with superior graphics, though I suspect about the same price. And anything from SGI has better OS and development tools than UNICOS did at the time. Plus they're easier to install, power and cool. I suspect that moving over to Win32 probably conferred a lot of advantages, developing on the same system that is your target market. I wonder if they would have ultimately done that even if the Cray deal was on the table.
- jwr 10y ago
  > An Onyx would be half the price of that Y-MP, with superior graphics. As someone who used both: it also would be a massive downgrade in terms of reliability and system stability. The Onyx I had access to had regular problems with various system hangs and lockups.
  - ethomson 10y ago
    Interesting. I'm sorry to hear that; I actually never used an Onyx but I went from a Cray 2 to a Cray X-MP to a Power Challenge. I was skeptical about Irix and the Challenge, mostly because a bunch of consumer-ish processors seemed like a downgrade, but it turned out to be both fast and rock solid for my workload. That said, I was a consumer, not an administrator, so it's very possible that our admins kept the reliability issues from affecting me.

by mrpippy 10y ago

ethomson 10y ago

Yeah, I was a bit surprised reading this, myself. $500k for a Y-MP does seem like a nice price - I assume they were getting a machine that had been previously loaned to someone who was upgrading to something massively multiprocessor. But it seems like the SGI Challenge architecture makes more sense in 1995. An Onyx would be half the price of that Y-MP, with superior graphics. A Power Challenge GR would as performant as the Y-MP, again with superior graphics, though I suspect about the same price. And anything from SGI has better OS and development tools than UNICOS did at the time. Plus they're easier to install, power and cool. I suspect that moving over to Win32 probably conferred a lot of advantages, developing on the same system that is your target market. I wonder if they would have ultimately done that even if the Cray deal was on the table.

jwr 10y ago
> An Onyx would be half the price of that Y-MP, with superior graphics. As someone who used both: it also would be a massive downgrade in terms of reliability and system stability. The Onyx I had access to had regular problems with various system hangs and lockups.
- ethomson 10y ago
  Interesting. I'm sorry to hear that; I actually never used an Onyx but I went from a Cray 2 to a Cray X-MP to a Power Challenge. I was skeptical about Irix and the Challenge, mostly because a bunch of consumer-ish processors seemed like a downgrade, but it turned out to be both fast and rock solid for my workload. That said, I was a consumer, not an administrator, so it's very possible that our admins kept the reliability issues from affecting me.