Silicon Graphics

Silicon Graphics logo - the SGI cube

Silicon Graphics (also known as SGI) was started by Jim Clark and Abby Silverstone back in 1982. Jim Clark was at Stanford University, and along with Marc Hannah had developed the revolutionary Geometry Engine - a VLSI implementation of geometry pipelines that provided specialised hardware that accelerated the "inner-loop" geometric computations needed to display three-dimensional images.

Silicon Graphics pioneered the computer graphics industry, and in the 80s and 90s there was hardly a feature film that wasn't powered by their awe-inspiring technology. Favourites such a Jurassic Park and Twister got their amazing special effects from the graphical and processing power of SGI machines. If you remember the computer room in Jurassic Park - the large red computers were SGI Crimsons, ground breaking desk-side graphics workstations that actually generated most of the effects in the film.

The core lineup of Silicon Graphics machines using a CPU developed by MIPS, and ran SGI's own flavour of UNIX - IRIX. SGI were the first company to release a 64bit CPU and a 64bit operating system, with the SGI Indy powered by a MIPS R4000 CPU and (later) with IRIX 6.2

SGI's machines have always been designed for one thing - performance. Unlike a PC, the focus is never on pure CPU performance, but on the balanced performance of the system as a whole. This makes the machines usable for years, giving them a long working life. The machines themselves were always colourful, beautifully designed, and excellently engineered - truly computing works of art.

SurfZone developer program promotional video

Silicon Graphics
The SGI website - sadly no longer as cool as it was when the Silver Surfer adorned it. Check out their new visualisation workstation.
SiliconBunny
SGI and IRIX guides, tips, and links to other great Silicon Graphics sites.
SGI's Silicon Surf website
This is from July 2007, a brief snapshot of what the Silicon Graphics site used to look like.
Nekochan
Nekochan has a thriving forum and a rapidly growing Wiki of information. Nekoware offers up to date packaged open source software for IRIX.

Indy

The Indy was the first Silicon Graphics machine I ever owned - in fact, it was the first one I can remember seeing. When I ventured onto the Internet in early 1994, after the NCSA website I visited the fledgling Netscape website, and from there stumbled across to the Silicon Graphics homepage. The famous Silver Surfer greeted me, as did the press releases and pictures of the Indy, the first 64bit computer.

Running IRIX 6.2 when I got it, I soon pushed the Indy to the maximum it could handle. An R5000 CPU running at 180mhz was matched with 256MB RAM (the maximum the machine could take) along with ZX graphics, a 32GB hard drive, and a big pile of external SCSI devices. Along with a 17" screen and the requisite Indycam, this machine blew me away - it was vastly faster and more responsive to use than the more modern workstations I was using.

3D animation of an Indy being assembled

Octane

After owning the Indy for several years, performance started to lag a bit. Having upgraded it to the max I was at a dead end, so it was time to look for a replacement.

Silicon Graphics had just announced the Octane2, the replacement for their Octane high-end workstation. Four year old ex-lease Octanes were just becoming available, so I splashed out a couple of thousand pounds on an entry level Octane with 1GB of RAM and a 195mhz R10k CPU.

Over the years I've just kept throwing hardware and workloads at this machine, and it's never skipped a beat, despite the fact that it's now over 10 years old. Now equipped with dual 300mhz R12k CPUs, the maximum 8GB RAM, and three 10,000 rpm 76GB hard drives. It also has the PCI cardcage fitted, which allows it to use standard PCI cards. This is full with two 2gb/s FC-AL HBAs, and an Ultra320 SCSI HBA. The XIO slots are packed out with MXE and SE graphics boardsets, for dual-head graphics, as well as an analogue video board. The power supply is a beefy 850W, and the frontplane is from an Octane2, featuring the updated XBOW chipset to allow the latest graphics cards and CPUs.

The machine could be pushed to dual R14k CPUs and V series graphics, but for the price of that lot, I ended up picking up it's replacement.

Steve Jobs loves the Octane

Silicon Graphics Fuel

Fuel

The Fuel was the last MIPS entry level workstation Silicon Graphics produced. The proprietary (but very fast) XIO slots were dropped in favour of PCI, and the graphics boardsets came with DVI connectors instead of the familiar 13W3 or LVDI.

Mine is kitted out with V10 graphics, a 600mhz R14k CPU, and 2GB RAM, along with a brace of Ultra320 SCSI and 2gb/s FC-AL HBAs.

I am constantly amazed with the SGI Fuel - it's devastatingly fast as a workstation, yet quiet - quieter even than a PC, which is truly shocking after listening to the jet-engine roar of the Octane.

Despite only a single CPU the Fuel has yet to struggle with any of the workstation or low-end graphics tasks I feed it.

Workstations, supercomputers - and the future

Silicon Graphics acquired Cray Research in 1996, and developed a series of supercomputers - the Origin 2000 and then the Origin 3000.

SGI stopped sale of their MIPS machines at the end of December 2006 (their workstations and supercomputers now use Intel x86 and Itanium CPUs running a heavily customised version of Linux). Despite this, the power and ability of IRIX and the MIPS-based machines makes them reliable and useful workhorses today, long after production stopped.

I started SiliconBunny as a central resource for IRIX and Silicon Graphics information. At the time, I was worked as a sysadmin for a small software development house. I'd discovered a company were selling off complete, cheap ex-lease SGI Indy systems, and I persuaded our company to buy some - both as general purpose workstations, and as hackable platforms to give the developers a bit more of an insight into UNIX development and 64bit computing.

Silicon Graphics news from SiliconBunny

SGI launches Altix UV
As expected, SGI have used the SC09 show to launch their latest single system image NUMA machine - the Altix UV. The specs are impressive - not only because SGI have dropped in Nehalem EX processors (as expected) - but the improvements in core density and NUMAlink bandwidth are also impressive. As with the previous [...] - 2 weeks ago
SGI at SC09
SC09 kicks off next week in the US, and SGI has been dropping hints about a big product announcement coming up. There’ll be the usual pimping of the latest lines from their product range: Octane™ III, SGI’s personal supercomputer, ICE Cube™ modular data center, CloudRack™ scalable workgroup clusters, SGI® Altix® ICE departmental server, and SGI® InfiniteStorage [...] - 3 weeks ago
SGI announce their quarterly earnings call
SGI have announced that their earnings call for the first quarter of fiscal year 2010 will be held on the 4th November at 2pm Pacific Time. The public is invited to listen to a live web cast of the call on the Investor Relations section of the Company’s website at investors.sgi.com. A replay of the web cast will [...] - 6 weeks ago
SGI to OEM BlueArc storage
SGI have announced an OEM with BlueArc, to rebadge and resell their Mercury storage systems. SGI join luminaries like HDS, who also resell BlueArc’s gear. When it comes to high speed NAS, BlueArc supply some of the fastest gear there is - this is a good fit for SGI. Under the agreement, SGI will extend [...] - 6 weeks ago
New SGI visualisation system for University of Tennessee
The National Science Foundation (NSF) in the USA has been handing out some grants this week. One of them is for the University of Tennessee, to the tune of $10 million, to deploy a new visualisation system: The University of Tennessee (UT) will receive $10 million from the National Science Foundation over four years to establish [...] - 2 months ago
SGI User Group meeting
Davin Chan, VP of the SGI User Group, has just dropped me an email with a reminder that their annual conference is coming up. Full details are: We will be holding our 7th annual Conference in San Antonio, TX Oct 21-23. Some of our featured keynotes will include: SGI Directions Mark Barrenechea, President & CEO, SGI Needle Amongst the HayStacks: [...] - 2 months ago
SGI launch the Octane III
SGI have posted details about their new workstation, the Octane III. Although SGI are raiding the ghosts of workstations past for the name, sadly this isn’t heralding a return to MIPS and IRIX goodness. In fact the Octane III seems to be going for the market created by the Cray CX-1, and the much missed machines [...] - 2 months ago
Impressive SPEC benchmarks from SGI
SGI have just posted some pretty decent SPEC benchmarks, and it’s clear that they’re aiming straight for the datacentre, calling out IBM, HP and Sun’s big SSI (Single System Image) machines. The benchmarks posted are for the Altix 4700, and the cynic in me says this is a bit of “rah rah rah” flag waving [...] - 3 months ago