4 ms·
Well, they tried producing high end Windows NT machines at one point, that would have run Office, had OpenGL support, etc. But no one bought them. So its not cl
by kjellsbells 2y ago
Well, they tried producing high end Windows NT machines at one point, that would have run Office, had OpenGL support, etc. But no one bought them. So its not clear that doing the same but with Irix would have gone any better.
The last-gasp part of SGI I would have like to have seen develop was Cellular IRIX. If I recall it was a sort of distributed OS where the scheduler was node aware and could parcel out tasks within a single process to other nodes. What NFS did for the local/remote file system split, Irix would do for compute. Never came to fruition.
- tombert 2y agoThat sounds pretty cool, I guess the idea was that the scheduler could figure out smartly where to put applications and minimize latency in the process?
- kjellsbells 2y agoYes, much like you would in an HPC system (much of Cellular IRIX was supposed to have been influenced by what Cray and SGI learned from each other when they merged). More details (PDF) here. Remember this is from 1998. Reading it again in 2024 there is of course quite a bit of foreshadowing of what we ended up with in cloud. And you won't be surprised to learn that the author ended up passing significant time working at both Microsoft and AWS after their SGI days. https://cug.org/5-publications/proceedings_attendee_lists/1998CD/S98PROC/AUTHORS/BRONER/ACROBAT.PDF https://cug.org/5-publications/proceedings_attendee_lists/19...
- sillywalk 2y agoArchive.org has a relatively detailed Tech Report from SGI on Cellular Irix. https://web.archive.org/web/19970706222424/http://www.sgi.com/Technology/Irix6.4/cellular_irix6.4tr.html https://web.archive.org/web/19970706222424/http://www.sgi.co...