pbrunnen put forth on 9/14/2010 8:07 PM: > Always was intrigued by the SGI equipment in the labs when I was at > University... Never played with one though. Checked out the specs of those > Origin boxes you mention. That was some horsepower for the time. Some years ago NCSA was selling off some retired 128P O2K systems really really cheap. I was only about 4 hours away from Urbana Champaign at the time and was really tempted. I was planning on running _lots_ of seti@home processes on it, mainly. ;) The price was really decent for what I'd be getting, but in the end I just couldn't justify it, no matter how cool it would have been to have a dual rack 32P SGI Origin 2000 running in the basement, crunching S@H. The reality check was that I could build a new 4U quad Xeon box at the time, of about the same overall performance, and with lots more disk, for a mere fraction of the cost of the used O2K. It wouldn't have the cool SGI badge or run IRIX, but I wouldn't have to add 220v circuits in the basement, or acquire a big 220v UPS, or pay a much larger monthly electric bill. A single socket 12-core 2 GHz Opteron 6100 series on a SuperMicro mobo with quad DDR3 memory channels w/32 GB RAM, sitting on your desktop, would simply run circles around that old 2 rack 32P O2K system, probably 5 to 1 or greater in parallel linpack--for less than $2k. -- Stan _______________________________________________ xfs mailing list xfs@xxxxxxxxxxx http://oss.sgi.com/mailman/listinfo/xfs
