29 Mar
2015
29 Mar
'15
3:32 p.m.
Amongst other things, I picked up a SGI Indigo2 system yesterday. It turned
out that it had the original packaging, and that it's an Impact 10000 machine.
For graphics however it has a four-board set; does anyone know what this
might be? Wikipedia talks about a three-board set for the Maximum Impact,
and fewer cards for lesser options, but I've not seen mention anywhere of a
machine using four (unless they're just not counting the analog output
board as part of the three?)
I'm not sure what it has for RAM; all of the sockets are filled. Someone
had scribbled 32MB and 1GB of disk on the box, but it has 2 x 4GB drives
fitted, so that's not necessarily correct.
I need to clean the dust out before I try powering up, but does anyone know
what a minimum config would be? Can I power up with no disks and
framebuffer, and expect to get a serial console? I'd like to not stress the
PSU (or risk the framebuffer cards) initially if possible - the previous
owner said they never ran it, although it was supposedly working when they
got it.
cheers
Jules
29 Mar
29 Mar
3:53 p.m.
On 03/29/2015 05:32 PM, Jules Richardson wrote:
For graphics however it has a four-board set; does
anyone know what this
might be? Wikipedia talks about a three-board set for the Maximum Impact,
and fewer cards for lesser options, but I've not seen mention anywhere of a
machine using four (unless they're just not counting the analog output
board as part of the three?)
Just on the back of that, the board with the 13w3 is actually the second
board down. The top board has a DA26F connector and a connector with three
rows of 15 pins each. Not a lot of clues on the board as to its purpose,
although it does say MGV1 in one corner. Maybe some form of hardware MPEG
encoder or capture board?
cheers
Jules
3:57 p.m.
On 29/03/2015 23:53, Jules Richardson wrote:
On 03/29/2015 05:32 PM, Jules Richardson wrote:
I think that board is indeed a video capture board. The unusual
connector is for an IndyCam.
Plenty of info & photos of the Indigo graphics options here...
http://www.sgistuff.net/hardware/systems/indigo2.html#graphics
You should be able to power the machine up without drives or graphics
options. If no keyboard is detected, all console IO is directed to the
first serial port.
Cheers,
Dave
For graphics however it has a four-board set;
does anyone know what this
might be? Wikipedia talks about a three-board set for the Maximum
Impact,
and fewer cards for lesser options, but I've not seen mention
anywhere of a
machine using four (unless they're just not counting the analog output
board as part of the three?)
Just on the back of that, the board with the 13w3 is actually the
second board down. The top board has a DA26F connector and a connector
with three rows of 15 pins each. Not a lot of clues on the board as to
its purpose, although it does say MGV1 in one corner. Maybe some form
of hardware MPEG encoder or capture board?
30 Mar
30 Mar
2:30 p.m.
On 03/29/2015 05:57 PM, David Williams wrote:
You should be able to power the machine up without
drives or graphics
options. If no keyboard is detected, all console IO is directed to the
first serial port.
... and, we're up and running. No immediate problems, apart from a broken
connector on the sled for the CDROM drive, which is really a non-issue
right now as there's no CDROM drive in the machine anyway (and the disks
have a viable OS).
The High Impact board set has the optional 4MB of texture RAM, so I'll be
looking for a copy of Quake 2 to run on it :-) It's got 384MB of RAM, which
is likely a healthy amount; I think 512MB was the official max on these
(and it sounds like they'd take a bit more with 128MB modules), but it
already gets pretty toasty in there with the graphics options that it has.
Oh, it turns out that it's an ex-Cray system. It looks like it's still got
Cray-related data on there, but whether it's anything
useful/interesting/non-sensitive etc. remains to be seen.
cheers
Jules
3:23 p.m.
On 30 March 2015 at 22:30, Jules Richardson
<jules.richardson99 at gmail.com> wrote:
On 03/29/2015 05:57 PM, David Williams wrote:
We had 640MB in quite a few R10k I2 boxes at Dreamworks. I seem to
recall issues with the Fore systems ATM drivers beyond that. (Don't
ask about Origin 2000 Fore ATM drivers and SGI 'lying sync' NFS
servers... "For all your data loss needs...")
You should be able to power the machine up without drives or graphics
options. If no keyboard is detected, all console IO is directed to the
first serial port.
... and, we're up and running. No immediate problems, apart from a broken
connector on the sled for the CDROM drive, which is really a non-issue right
now as there's no CDROM drive in the machine anyway (and the disks have a
viable OS).
The High Impact board set has the optional 4MB of texture RAM, so I'll be
looking for a copy of Quake 2 to run on it :-) It's got 384MB of RAM, which
is likely a healthy amount; I think 512MB was the official max on these (and
it sounds like they'd take a bit more with 128MB modules), but it already
gets pretty toasty in there with the graphics options that it has.
Oh, it turns out that it's an ex-Cray system. It looks like it's still got
Cray-related data on there, but whether it's anything
useful/interesting/non-sensitive etc. remains to be seen. 
11:05 p.m.
On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 11:23:21PM +0100, David Brownlee wrote:
We had 640MB in quite a few R10k I2 boxes at Dreamworks. I seem to
recall issues with the Fore systems ATM drivers beyond that. (Don't
ask about Origin 2000 Fore ATM drivers and SGI 'lying sync' NFS
servers... "For all your data loss needs...")
What about the Fore ATM drivers and NFS? ;)
I'm hoping to get my Onyx2 rack set up this year. I'm hoping to keep my
data.
/P
31 Mar
31 Mar
1:40 a.m.
On 31 March 2015 at 07:05, Pontus Pihlgren <pontus at update.uu.se> wrote:
On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 11:23:21PM +0100, David
Brownlee wrote:
The Fore EISA drivers not that bad. The PCI ones, were... less stable.
Of course the PCI based SGI machines came with Fast Ethernet or
better, so it was less of an issue (except when you had a studio wide
ATM network :)
Regarding SGI NFS servers. Typically NFS runs synchronously, where the
client keeps a copy of the written data until the NFS server reports
it has hit persistent storage. Hence the fancy battery backed up
PRESTOserve type hardware used to speed up servers.
SGI took a different approach, they lied and reported the data as
written to storage as soon as it hit RAM on the server. Unsurprisingly
this led to significant performance wins. Also somewhat obvious was
the effect of a server reboot due to buggy drivers to the couple of GB
of unsynced data which clients believed had been written. Combine this
with scene assets which are being constantly migrated around storage
and to/from tape resulted in a fair amount of work needing to be
redone.
A certain degree of clown college was in effect...
We had 640MB in quite a few R10k I2 boxes at Dreamworks. I seem to
recall issues with the Fore systems ATM drivers beyond that. (Don't
ask about Origin 2000 Fore ATM drivers and SGI 'lying sync' NFS
servers... "For all your data loss needs...")
What about the Fore ATM drivers and NFS? ;)
I'm hoping to get my Onyx2 rack set up this year. I'm hoping to keep my
data. 
8:24 a.m.
I work in medium-scale HPC (~3-4K cores, ~8 petabytes online) and we do run
NFS in async mode still to this day for performance's sake (of course,
cognizant of the potential risk involved). Honestly, on Linux, our
experience has not been bad. If we're talking about things SGI did that can
be dicey, I would focus more on XFS :O
I don't mean that as a burn to anyone involved; Dave Chinner and team does
a good job with the resources they have and the Linux kernel they have to
deal with and XFS does fly even if it is a little fragile sometimes...
Always had good luck with it on IRIX at home... but my duty cycle at home
is much, much, much lower than at work, LOL.
I would love to get my hands on an EISA multimode OC-3... I have a ton of
Fore PCA-200 cards stashed and I am still running OC-3 ATM in production at
my home on a ForeRunner LE155 switch and it would be great fun to tie in
one of my Indigo2s.
Anyway, more on-topic, congratulations, Jules, that's a fine system you
have found! My strongest Indigo2 is a bit of a Frankenstein :O Non-factory
config... R10K at 175 Extreme in green skins, non-Impact PSU, 256 MB RAM and
it runs IRIX 6.5.x very well; graphics performance would be horrible for
anything textured but for regular interactive use, browsing the Web,
running all the demos, it's plenty fast. I have a few more in my storage
room; one of the more rare R8K systems, an R4K/250 system (which is also
pretty quick) and another R4K system and a half in parts... I was obsessed
with these things when I was in high school :O
IMO, Indigo2 systems are great machines; I have found them to be very
robust in the long-term although from my experience the Impact PSUs seem a
bit more prone to failure than the non-Impact PSUs (the mode seems to be
harmless to the rest of the system; it just one day decides it won't power
on; reminiscent of how I've seen the Nidec supplies go on the Indys). Parts
are pretty easy to find and fairly inexpensive as SGI equipment goes.
If you want to know the specifics, you have probably found this already,
but there are two SGI-specific commands you can run from IRIX, "hinv" and
"gfxinfo" which will tell you what's there.. You can also run
"hinv" from
the ROM monitor.
Have fun!
Best,
Sean
On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 4:40 AM, David Brownlee <abs at absd.org> wrote:
On 31 March 2015 at 07:05, Pontus Pihlgren <pontus
at update.uu.se> wrote:
On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 11:23:21PM +0100, David
Brownlee wrote:
The Fore EISA drivers not that bad. The PCI ones, were... less stable.
Of course the PCI based SGI machines came with Fast Ethernet or
better, so it was less of an issue (except when you had a studio wide
ATM network :)
Regarding SGI NFS servers. Typically NFS runs synchronously, where the
client keeps a copy of the written data until the NFS server reports
it has hit persistent storage. Hence the fancy battery backed up
PRESTOserve type hardware used to speed up servers.
SGI took a different approach, they lied and reported the data as
written to storage as soon as it hit RAM on the server. Unsurprisingly
this led to significant performance wins. Also somewhat obvious was
the effect of a server reboot due to buggy drivers to the couple of GB
of unsynced data which clients believed had been written. Combine this
with scene assets which are being constantly migrated around storage
and to/from tape resulted in a fair amount of work needing to be
redone.
A certain degree of clown college was in effect...
We had 640MB in quite a few R10k I2 boxes at Dreamworks. I seem to
recall issues with the Fore systems ATM drivers beyond that. (Don't
ask about Origin 2000 Fore ATM drivers and SGI 'lying sync' NFS
servers... "For all your data loss needs...")
What about the Fore ATM drivers and NFS? ;)
I'm hoping to get my Onyx2 rack set up this year. I'm hoping to keep my
data.
6:11 p.m.
On 03/31/2015 10:24 AM, Sean Caron wrote:
Anyway, more on-topic, congratulations, Jules,
that's a fine system you
have found!
Indeed it is! Although there were Indys and O2's available as well, the
Indigo2 just seemed like the more interesting of the three - and that was
before I discovered that it was fitted with such a high spec graphics option.
My strongest Indigo2 is a bit of a Frankenstein :O
Non-factory
config... R10K at 175 Extreme in green skins
Green? I don't think I've seen that before, only the purple and teal
variants. Was there some significance to the color in terms of hardware,
target market etc., or was it just a customer option?
one of the more rare R8K systems
I heard that those are uncommon (but also that performance is nothing to
write home about, unless you're crafting code specifically for them)
I was obsessed with these things when I was in high
school :O
:-) It's taken me fifteen years (since I used to use SGI hardware at an old
workplace) to find any systems of my own, although a few Indys, Challenges
and 4D's passed briefly through my hands during my museum days. I think SGI
had a habit of taking hardware back when the customer was done with it and
destroying it, so there are comparatively few (compared to Sun etc.) still
out in the wild.
IMO, Indigo2 systems are great machines; I have found
them to be very
robust in the long-term although from my experience the Impact PSUs seem a
bit more prone to failure than the non-Impact PSUs (the mode seems to be
harmless to the rest of the system; it just one day decides it won't power
on; reminiscent of how I've seen the Nidec supplies go on the Indys).
I'm certainly wary of loading this one up with more RAM just because the
PSU must be reasonably stressed already running the graphics hardware and
two drives. Eventually I think I'll put one of the drives into an external
enclosure (or tweak things so it's not needed).
Oh, this machine has the optional feet for standing it sideways, too - I'm
not sure if I mentioned that. I think I like that configuration more than a
'slab' form factor, but I'm not sure if it's better or worse for heat
dissipation.
If you want to know the specifics, you have probably
found this already,
but there are two SGI-specific commands you can run from IRIX, "hinv" and
"gfxinfo" which will tell you what's there.. You can also run
"hinv" from
the ROM monitor.
Yup. I *used* to know my way around them. I'm just very, very rusty right
now :-)
I got an Origin 2200 at the same time which I'm just working on cleaning up
at the moment. I've got four node boards for that one (2 CPUs per board)
and an enormous quantity of RAM, but as of right now I'm not sure if the
boards all have compatible CPU types (I think some mixing and matching was
possible, but not all combinations work), and I have a feeling I may need
an additional board (which I don't have) anyway to build an 8-CPU system.
Still, 4 should be possible (and as a plus I can run that from a regular
outlet).
cheers
Jules
6:46 p.m.
Sorry, it's a teal cabinet; I'm crass; I call them "green" and
"purple",
respectively, for non-Impact and Impact I2s :)
You are right, even the interactive performance of the R8K had me a bit
taken aback; it feels more like you are on an R4K/100 or R4K/150 machine at
best. But I understand in its day it really flew on the FP codes; the claim
was something like the R8K could sustain the FP performance of a Cray Y-MP
EL CPU or something like that... I don't know if this claim was ever really
substantiated in the real world... But it's a neat little oddball; I like
having a white elephant around.
I guess I was just lucky to get into the hobby at the right time ca.
1999-2001 when a lot of this particular gear just happened to be hitting
the secondhand market... I got a lot of my gear from a great guy, Herb
Johnson, maybe a few other folks here have done business with him... he's
out on the east coast somewhere... and I think he got a lot of his stuff
from academic property dispo sales. I've gotten a
few directly from
property disposition at various Michigan universities; a friend
also got
one via the same means. Very little of what I've got came out of a private
commercial setting (although I have mostly /worked/ in academia).
Great that you got a pair of matching feet! Use em! I think the system
looks absolutely gorgeous when on stands. Laying an I2 horizontally on a
desktop does not do it justice, IMO ;) With all my SGI scrounging I only
ever ended up with one pair of stands and I keep them on my display
system... I don't know that it affects cooling efficiency much how you've
got it oriented so long as there isn't stuff piled up around the bottom
blocking airflow when the system is vertical.
Good luck with the Origin, I've never personally owned any SGI that
large... closest I come is I've got some guts to a Crimson. IIRC that
hardware was considered kind of "finicky" in its day so might not hurt to
run in a reduced config and keep some for spare parts.
Best,
Sean
On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 9:11 PM, Jules Richardson <
jules.richardson99 at gmail.com> wrote:
On 03/31/2015 10:24 AM, Sean Caron wrote:
I heard that those are uncommon (but also that performance is nothing to
write home about, unless you're crafting code specifically for them)
I was obsessed with these things when I was in high school :O
:-) It's taken me fifteen years (since I used to use SGI hardware at an
old workplace) to find any systems of my own, although a few Indys,
Challenges and 4D's passed briefly through my hands during my museum days.
I think SGI had a habit of taking hardware back when the customer was done
with it and destroying it, so there are comparatively few (compared to Sun
etc.) still out in the wild.
IMO, Indigo2 systems are great machines; I have found them to be very
> robust in the long-term although from my experience the Impact PSUs seem a
> bit more prone to failure than the non-Impact PSUs (the mode seems to be
> harmless to the rest of the system; it just one day decides it won't power
> on; reminiscent of how I've seen the Nidec supplies go on the Indys).
I'm certainly wary of loading this one up with more RAM just because the
PSU must be reasonably stressed already running the graphics hardware and
two drives. Eventually I think I'll put one of the drives into an external
enclosure (or tweak things so it's not needed).
Oh, this machine has the optional feet for standing it sideways, too - I'm
not sure if I mentioned that. I think I like that configuration more than a
'slab' form factor, but I'm not sure if it's better or worse for heat
dissipation.
If you want to know the specifics, you have probably found this already,
> but there are two SGI-specific commands you can run from IRIX, "hinv" and
> "gfxinfo" which will tell you what's there.. You can also run
"hinv" from
> the ROM monitor.
Yup. I *used* to know my way around them. I'm just very, very rusty right
now :-)
I got an Origin 2200 at the same time which I'm just working on cleaning
up at the moment. I've got four node boards for that one (2 CPUs per board)
and an enormous quantity of RAM, but as of right now I'm not sure if the
boards all have compatible CPU types (I think some mixing and matching was
possible, but not all combinations work), and I have a feeling I may need
an additional board (which I don't have) anyway to build an 8-CPU system.
Still, 4 should be possible (and as a plus I can run that from a regular
outlet).
cheers
Jules
Anyway, more on-topic, congratulations, Jules,
that's a fine system you
have found!
Indeed it is! Although there were Indys and O2's available as well, the
Indigo2 just seemed like the more interesting of the three - and that was
before I discovered that it was fitted with such a high spec graphics
option.
My strongest Indigo2 is a bit of a Frankenstein :O Non-factory
config... R10K at 175 Extreme in green skins
Green? I don't think I've seen that before, only the purple and teal
variants. Was there some significance to the color in terms of hardware,
target market etc., or was it just a customer option?
one of the more rare R8K systems
1 Apr
1 Apr
7:31 p.m.
On 03/31/2015 08:46 PM, Sean Caron wrote:
Sorry, it's a teal cabinet; I'm crass; I call
them "green" and "purple",
respectively, for non-Impact and Impact I2s :)
:-) I think one of the SGI's did have green on it - I wonder if it wasn't
one of the early IRIS systems, though. But I think SGI would work with
people and create custom colors for the MIPS-era machines if they wanted,
no doubt for a hefty price.
[R8k]
But it's a neat little oddball; I like having a white elephant around.
Yup :) I know what you mean, it's not as though any of this stuff is going
to be *fast* in modern terms, so rare/goofy is often more fun.
I guess I was just lucky to get into the hobby at the
right time ca.
1999-2001 when a lot of this particular gear just happened to be hitting
the secondhand market... I got a lot of my gear from a great guy, Herb
Johnson
I think he used to be on this list, I'm not sure if he still is, though.
Great that you got a pair of matching feet! Use em! I
think the system
looks absolutely gorgeous when on stands. Laying an I2 horizontally on a
desktop does not do it justice, IMO ;)
Yeah, I think they look a lot nicer standing up. Given comments about how
brittle some of the plastics can be, I'm not sure I'd want to try removing
them now anyway ;)
Good luck with the Origin, I've never personally
owned any SGI that
large... closest I come is I've got some guts to a Crimson. IIRC that
hardware was considered kind of "finicky" in its day so might not hurt to
run in a reduced config and keep some for spare parts.
True. And it's not like I *need* all the boards fitted anyway. It just
would have been nice to fire it up as an 8-CPU system just once :-) (the
one I had at work back in the day was an 8-CPU machine; I remember Oracle
throwing a fit one day, because they licensed per-CPU and had been under
the impression for months that it was a single-CPU system)
It looks like I've got 3GB of RAM for it - all in 64MB modules. There are a
lot of them...
cheers
Jules
4 Apr
4 Apr
4:45 a.m.
Am 02.04.15 um 04:31 schrieb Jules Richardson:
:-) I think one of the SGI's did have green on it
- I wonder if it
wasn't one of the early IRIS systems, though.
My Octane is quite green...
But I think SGI would
work with people and create custom colors for the MIPS-era machines if
they wanted, no doubt for a hefty price.
I have grey skins for a Indigo. It has
"Siemens" printed on it. Was some
OEM thing for some CAD stuff. Similar: We had some Indigos in indogo
color but with "CDC Cyber 910" (yes, CDC as Controll Data Corp.)
printing at the Unix-AG.
--
tsch??,
Jochen
8:22 a.m.
Yep, Control Data rebadged several SGI machines; I've seen (pictures of)
Indys with CDC stickers on them, and I personally have at least one or two
Indigo machines rebadged as "Control Data Cyber 910" as you say; the color
is the same as the stock Indigo but the silk-screen on the front, and the
manufacturer label on the rear, instead says "Control Data".
My entire stock of Indigo (and older) SGI serial keyboards is branded
Control Data as well!
They may also have done this rebadging to some PI/Power Series machines and
Indigo2s... I think sgistuff.info has some photos of a CDC-rebaged Personal
Iris.
We probably don't get the Siemens ones over here in the US; as far as I
know... Anyone stateside got one?
Best,
Sean
On Sat, Apr 4, 2015 at 7:45 AM, Jochen Kunz <jkunz at unixag-kl.fh-kl.de>
wrote:
Am 02.04.15 um 04:31 schrieb Jules Richardson:
:-) I think one of the SGI's did have green
on it - I wonder if it
wasn't one of the early IRIS systems, though.
My Octane is quite green...
But I think SGI would
work with people and create custom colors for the MIPS-era machines if
they wanted, no doubt for a hefty price.
I have grey skins for a Indigo. It has
"Siemens" printed on it. Was some
OEM thing for some CAD stuff. Similar: We had some Indigos in indogo
color but with "CDC Cyber 910" (yes, CDC as Controll Data Corp.)
printing at the Unix-AG.
--
tsch??,
Jochen
30 Mar
30 Mar
3:54 p.m.
On 03/30/2015 02:30 PM, Jules Richardson wrote:
The High Impact board set has the optional 4MB of texture RAM
Nice!
It's got 384MB of RAM, which is likely a healthy
amount;
For retrocomputing tourism, that's plenty. IRIX has a typical 1990s RISC
memory footprint, outside of memory hungry modeling/effects/video
editing applications.
I think 512MB was the official max on these (and it
sounds like they'd
take a bit more with 128MB modules)
An Indigo2 with the older R4k CPU modules (IP22) will max out at 384MB,
using 32MB fast page mode parity SIMMs. The R8k CPU systems (IP26) will
max out at 640MB using 64MB SIMMs, and officially the R10k CPU modules
(IP28) will get up to 768MB using the same 64MB SIMMs.
But yes, using 128MB SIMMs you can get to a full gigabyte, as documented
here by Ian Mapleson: http://www.futuretech.blinkenlights.nl/i2gigaram.html.
General information about the I2 can be found here, including pointers
for 128MB parts that should work in a 1GB configuration:
http://nekochan.net/wiki/SGI_Indigo2
--S.
29 Mar
29 Mar
4:37 p.m.
On Sun, 29 Mar 2015 17:32:19 -0500
Jules Richardson <jules.richardson99 at gmail.com> wrote:
Amongst other things, I picked up a SGI Indigo2 system yesterday. It
turned out that it had the original packaging, and that it's an
Impact 10000 machine.
For graphics however it has a four-board set; does anyone know what
this might be? Wikipedia talks about a three-board set for the
Maximum Impact, and fewer cards for lesser options, but I've not seen
mention anywhere of a machine using four (unless they're just not
counting the analog output board as part of the three?)
I'm not sure what it has for RAM; all of the sockets are filled.
Someone had scribbled 32MB and 1GB of disk on the box, but it has 2 x
4GB drives fitted, so that's not necessarily correct.
I need to clean the dust out before I try powering up, but does
anyone know what a minimum config would be? Can I power up with no
disks and framebuffer, and expect to get a serial console? I'd like
to not stress the PSU (or risk the framebuffer cards) initially if
possible - the previous owner said they never ran it, although it was
supposedly working when they got it.
Lots of Technical info on SGI systems here:
"SGI Advice and Technical Data"
http://vintagecomputers.info/sgi.html
This is a link to the North American mirror (which I host) of the
primary UK site.
Cheers,
Lyle
--
Bickley Consulting West Inc.
http://bickleywest.com
"Black holes are where God is dividing by zero"
3317
days inactive
3323
days old
14 comments
8 participants
participants (8)
-
abs＠absd.org -
classiccmp＠crash.com -
dave＠willomail.co.uk -
jkunz＠unixag-kl.fh-kl.de -
jules.richardson99＠gmail.com -
lbickley＠bickleywest.com -
pontus＠Update.UU.SE -
scaron＠umich.edu