SGI Unveils Octane™ III Personal Supercomputer

[TheWraith]

Wow, I thought SGI was dead! That machine sounds pretty amazing though, 20 Intel Quad Core Xeon processors, 960GB of ram! It's all a bit too expensive for me though.

[wurp]

looks pretty useless to me, the base price of $7,995 is probably for the 2 cpu version, SGI just can't compete which is why they went bancrupt..

nothing to see here

[cresshead]

still got my 2 sgi's from waay back...silicon graphics320 running nt4 and a sgi230 running windows2000 both seem to be fine still...just running them today to keep hard drives/batteries and other stuff loose n free....not had any issue with windows based sgi's
myself but i only used them for 3d and compositing with max and combustion.

wonder what the price is for the 19x intel atom beast is??
could be great with blender for rendering

ohh! i see they have a 38core intel atom powered version...neat!

[BlueTide]

Anybody up for testing out Renderman performance on this now that the licensing has changed (/joke)? :)

The simpler new unlimited threading model (RPS v15.0, RMS v3.0, RfM v4.0) will allow each license to use any number of threads. For example, if you have a dual quad machine, then RenderMan can automatically allocate a full rendering thread to each of the 8 processors to render your frame. This model scales simply to upcoming hardware and the entire compute capacity of machines with 16 cores or more can if desired be assigned to a singe rendering session.

[cresshead]

looks pretty useless to me, the base price of $7,995 is probably for the 2 cpu version, SGI just can't compete which is why they went bancrupt..

nothing to see here

well if you look at the options the smallest is
a 16 core xeon [4 xeon chips]
next up is the 38 core intel atom based pc [19 intel atom dual core chips]
top is the20 intel xeon quad-core 5500 chips

[Pinoy McGee]

Cool.

Now it's affordable for rogue third world nations to jump start their weapons simulation programs.

[aglick]

These new SGI units aren't designed for use in the content creation market. They weren't made to do 3D modeling/animation for media & entertainment.

They are made for scientific/academic problem solving.

[LucentDreams]

These new SGI units aren't designed for use in the content creation market. They weren't made to do 3D modeling/animation for media & entertainment.

They are made for scientific/academic problem solving.

Seems to mone of the three groups is Graphics workstation designed specifically for doing 3d work and looks like a perfectly good and impressive workstation http://www.sgi.com/products/servers/octaneIII/graphics_workstation.html

No idea on the price though.

[aglick]

Hey Kai -

I think You are correct that the configuration you point to does share some parts and design approaches with "normal" 3D workstations - but there are big differences in the type of users and workloads that they were designed to address.

We're in close communications with SGI on a number of initiatives-

In fact, until recently, BOXX was designing and manufacturing hardware (visual computing clusters) for SGI - and had been for for a number of years.

This new Octane III system (which BOXX does not build) is surely a slick product - but it wasn't designed for our industry.

Of course, one could probably buy one of these things for running 2D/3D design software...but it wouldn't be cost-effective -and wouldn't likely be much faster than standard dual Xeon workstations when it comes to 3D rendering or day-to-day design tasks.

[3DDave]

Can I get one at Fry's :)

[wwswimming]

How good is it compared to other popular workstations like Mac Pro? And would Maya, 3ds max and similar graphics tools work well?


Octane III is available in a variety of configurations:



Ten dual-socket, Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series-based nodes
One dual-socket, Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series-based workstation with advanced NVIDIA graphics and/or GP-GPU card support
Nineteen single-socket, Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® processor 3400 series-based nodes
Nineteen single-socket, Dual-Core Intel® Atom™ processor-based nodes
the dual socket version is comparable to a dual-Nehalem board, e.g.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813151195
"TYAN S7012GM4NR Dual LGA 1366 Intel 5520 SSI EEB Dual Intel Xeon Processor 5500 Series Server Motherboard" $460

with 2 of these
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117185
"Intel Xeon E5520 Nehalem 2.26GHz 4 x 256KB L2 Cache 8MB L3 Cache LGA 1366 80W Quad-Core Server Processor" 2 x $38
(with hyperthreading)

... so you can buy the core of the machine for a little over $1200 in the US, putting total system cost in the range of $2500 to $3K.

the Tyan-Xeon combination will support OS' that run Maya etc., with 8 cores & 16 threads. with a gaming video card that is thoroughly tested (e.g. ATI 4870), you would have a system cost under $3K and it would be quite comparable to the SGI dual socket model.

wonder what motherboard the SGI uses - their own or something like the Tyan ?

[cresshead]

i've sent off to find out u.k. pricing information...the graphics workstaion looks good for general graphics work to me.
i'm eager to see how much the 19 cpu atom based setup is for rendering.

[dbisme]

i've sent off to find out u.k. pricing information...the graphics workstaion looks good for general graphics work to me.
i'm eager to see how much the 19 cpu atom based setup is for rendering.

Is that the same 1.6 Atom processor that they use in Netbooks? WTF?
19 Atom processors = 1 or 2 Quandcore processors at most!

Weird! Or did I miss something?

[cresshead]

it's the dualcore variant of the atom chip..singlecore is the usual option for netbooks like my samsung netbook.

the point your missiing is the 38cores
1 quadcore has 4 cores...

yeah the 1 core 1.6ghz atom is not a match per core for a typical quadcore, it renders out a bit slower than a amd 1.6ghz single core in a lightwave 9.6 test i did a while back so a dualcore would be twice as fast or there abouts.

a quadcore is not 19 times faster than a 19cpu [38core] atom based system...nor would a 8 core be.

[dbisme]

it's the dualcore variant of the atom chip..singlecore is the usual option for netbooks like my samsung netbook.

the point your missiing is the 38cores
1 quadcore has 4 cores...

yeah the 1 core 1.6ghz atom is not a match per core for a typical quadcore, it renders out a bit slower than a amd 1.6ghz single core in a lightwave 9.6 test i did a while back so a dualcore would be twice as fast or there abouts.

a quadcore is not 19 times faster than a 19cpu [38core] atom based system...nor would a 8 core be.

I understand all that, but I wondered what the advantage would be of using Atoms-is it mainly because they're cheaper? I mean, why wouldn't they use one of the sleek and sassy upscale multi-core chipsets? Just curious, not arguing, I really know very little about this subject.

Cheers

Doug

[Srek]

The main feature of the Atom processor is it's CPU power/ Energy consumption ratio.
My guess is they use it to provide multi core environments at low energy costs.

Cheers
Björn

[uncle_frankie]

Be interesting to see reviews of these different units in game and post production houses though I'm guessing then only run some variant of Linux?

[cresshead]

Be interesting to see reviews of these different units in game and post production houses though I'm guessing then only run some variant of Linux?
err no.

Software Support
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 5
Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11
SGI ProPack for Linux ProPack 6
Microsoft Windows Windows Vista, Windows 7

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, 11
SGI ProPack for Linux ProPack 6
Cluster Manager SGI ISLE™
Batch Scheduler Altair PBS Pro

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, 11
SGI ProPack for Linux ProPack 6
Cluster Manager SGI ISLE™
Batch Scheduler Altair PBS Pro
VMWare ESX 4.0
Microsoft Windows Windows Server 2008, Windows HPC Server 2008

[Dead]

The only SGI machines I ever encountered were the Autodesk Flame/smoke/inferno/lustre boxes. I'm guessing these machines are still aimed at that market? Or a 20xXeon replacing the old Oynx/Irix machines. Got to do some flame/smoke work on Octane II's and used to love the way they worked.

[Kai01W]

The only SGI machines I ever encountered were the Autodesk Flame/smoke/inferno/lustre boxes. I'm guessing these machines are still aimed at that market?
I don't think so. These systems are running on "normal" HP Workstations these days and I don't think Autodesk is ever going back to SGI. While having such an extraordinary machine could help justify the extreme cost of the system I think Autodesk won't do it, they realised that customers still pay the premium even though its just running on normal PCs basically.

-k

[KayosIII]

Wow, I thought SGI was dead! That machine sounds pretty amazing though, 20 Intel Quad Core Xeon processors, 960GB of ram! It's all a bit too expensive for me though.

SGI is dead... Or rather another company (Rackspace if remember correctly) bought SGI and changed their name to SGI....
Long live SGI

[switchblade327]

This case isn't nearly awesome enough for the SGI name. It should look more like a neon purple toaster from outer space.

[WyattHarris]

Aw, why change the logo? :D

http://design-crit.com/blog/images/sgi_logo.jpg

Looks like a fairly standard blade server or similar device. Should be much more stable.

[KayosIII]

That kind of makes sense I think blade servers is what rackspace did

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