Hey everyone, quick question(s) for people who have the know how. I have a bunch of sgi o2 machines sitting in a dust farm at the university. I've been given access to the machines and basically been told to what I want with them. I'm wondering if it's possible to hook them up in a grid engine or render farm as they are (running IRIX). And if not, can I do it running linux on them? Any help or pointing in the right direction would be helpful. All I've got so far is throw them in the dumpster - but I hate to do that…. more computing power means more joy.

*Can* you do it? Sure. *Should* you do it? That's a tougher call. Compared to what you can get nowadays, they are such a scale of slow that I'm not sure if you can justify the power you'll be burning to use them. I understand that you have them now, it costs no money to purchase gear, but you'll have to decide if you want all that power getting converted to heat(someone's got to pay for that).

As far as what to run - of course IRIX is the easiest - but what applications would you want to run on it? Your apps will drive what OS to run. If you want to go Linux that's an option, you might have more choice. I'd just type “linux on o2” into google and see it that's something you'd want to try. There's lots of results(most really old, however).

Apart from a personal project you might get a kick out of doing, I wouldn't bother myself. I tend to not get very attached to hardware - it ages like the dickens and a year after you get it you tend to curse it.

Cheers,

J.C.

Well here's the thing. We have a graphics lab with about 10 computers in it (windows machines running houdini). However, what happens is that students (including myself) will come in to render out animations and lock up several computers in the lab.

I was thinking exactly on the lines that yes: I have the machines now (well the university has them), costs no money etc, etc. As for the electricity bill, the University will pay for the power and heating costs and it doesn't affect us in Fine Arts.

I figure if I can hook them up in parallel, it doesn't matter if it takes three weeks for the machines (there are 12 of them) to render it out, the workstations are free for other students to use (and it will be nice and toasty in the lab during the cold winter!!!).

The only thing I would need to run on the machines is houdini (some version of 7 or even just mantra), and some program that would allow a distributed solution to renders (I understand you have a pretty good understanding of the sun n1 grid engine).

As for installing linux on the machines I am always up for a technical challenge. But only if it will work, and from what I can have heard the linux that runs on o2's sounds more like patchwork quilts than operating systems.

as an SGI “collector” (I've bunch of ‘em bought from ebay and my own website runs on my O2 at home)…. i wouldnt say “put linux on it”… too poor supported hardware… and nothing runs better than IRIX on ’em …
and as an SGI “collector” I also wish to see my Origin 2000 crunch some Mantra scene spreaded on his 8 cpu ….. but is there a Mantra standalone installer of latest release available out there?… I cant remember if it was SUn Grid engine or what else I saw recently.. and in the supported system I read SGI as well… in fact I wondered why SGI is still supported since there's no Houdini for IRIX after 6.1….

but it would be really fun to make some “old times” tests…

cheers

Well, as I mentioned, what apps you want to run, and are available, will drive this. You're obviously going to be running some fairly ancient software.

Only other thing I'd add is that MIPS cpus are slow. Slow. Slow. A comparison of a half million dollar SGI fridge(not as old as it sounds) against a humble P4 Intel linux box showed it was *significantly* slower.

Cheers,

J.C.

Also, don't forget that you won't be able to run Houdini on them (unless you're running IRIX and the very old versions of Houdini that still run on IRIX). Linux on MIPS != Linux on x86, which is the only type of CPU we support.

So basically it is not possible to even run houdini 7 on an sgi o2 machine?

So basically it is not possible to even run houdini 7 on an sgi o2 machine?

Sealth
So basically it is not possible to even run houdini 7 on an sgi o2 machine?

afaik … nope.

Hi,

Short answer: don't do it. You'll be disappointed and some people may become dependent on them.

Long answer:
Actually, technically speaking, I think it will work - but you're going to have to find the last IRIX release of Houdini. You definitely want IRIX installed on the O2, but I would assume that is already done: I mean, these O2's were working at some stage, right?

Generally speaking, if you're going to do this, O2's run best if each is given a whole frame to render (rather than, say have two sharing the render of one frame).

yes. They will be slow - but they will probably render - mantra may not have changed as much as Houdini. In the simplest case, if these O2's are on the same network (can you ping them from your regular Houdini workstation?) then a first test would be to send a render to one. If you click on the “+” beside the mantra Render Command in the Mantra ROP you can send a render to a remote host. (this assumes you can connect to the sgi's over the net, and they have houdini installed and licensed). Or open an ssh connection to one sgi from your PC and manually run “mantra” on an .ifd file.

More simply, if you have houdini installed on one of the sgi's - just login and try a local render.. The point being, once you see the performance, you might decide all the rest of the work (networking, installing, scripting, login permisssions, user accounts, secure shell setup?, NFS, etc) might not be worth the time & effort.

That is, instead of looking for more cpu's, you might gain more by optimising your current render performance! Wouldn't it be better to spend your uni time studying mantra, instead of IRIX?

cheers, ben.