I suppose I should be resigned to the whole benchmark silliness, where vendors highly tune their own systems and then run favourable benchmark tools – that have no real-world relevance – and compare the results against dissimilar and un-tuned gear from their rivals.

It’s the biggest ego match in the industry, and it’s all pretty sad. Are people really naive enough to buy kit based on these benchmarks, instead of trying out different vendors’ solutions in-house using their own real world workloads?

Regardless, I find the latest press release from Sun touting their ‘HPC leadership’ a bit much.

In it, Sun cites SGI beating FLUENT benchmarks. Yet, the press release doesn’t mention numbers at all. The link to the actual FLUENT benchmarks shows no values at all for the X2250 cluster Sun used, and the main Sun benchmarks website makes no mention of these ‘HPC dominating’ benchmark figures either. Surely if you’re going to trumpet the results, then you should also be making the actual figures available?

bmseer (a blogger from Sun who I have a huge respect for, and who regularly picks apart the outrageous benchmark figures from IBM) should be hanging his head in shame right about now ;-)

Regardless, the Sun benchmark site is well worth a visit at http://www.sun.com/benchmarks/

Silicon Graphics could take a leaf out of Sun’s book here and be far more pro-active and upfront with their current systems’ performance figures.

Meanwhile I live in hope for the day when we have a benchmark that measures the enormity of a vendor’s lies in their press releases. Like the Top 500, I’m sure IBM would be way out in front.

An interesting article has popped up on The Register by Timothy Morgan, where he argues that the tech stock slide produced by the ongoing credit crisis has provided a perfect time for large, established – and exposed – technology companies to take themselves private.

The usual R&D heavy suspects are discussed – Sun, Cray – and Silicon Graphics.

Silicon Graphics, once a high-flying Unix workstation and supercomputer maker, should also think about going private. The company’s shares trade on the small cap portion of the NASDAQ exchange, and it has a market capitalization of $101m as we go to press. In the first six months of 2008, SGI posted sales of $172.9m but booked losses of $74.9m. The company had just under $40m in cash as the June quarter closed.

It could be possible, especially with continued strong government contracts and continued interest from large investors.

What do you think?

The main SGI newsgroups are in the comp.sys.sgi hierarchy:

• SGI/IRIX administration: comp.sys.sgi.admin

• SGI hardware discussions: comp.sys.sgi.hardware

• SGI/IRIX applications: comp.sys.sgi.apps

• Graphics issues: comp.sys.sgi.graphics

• Miscellaneous SGI chat/flamewars: comp.sys.sgi.misc

• Buy some SGI kit: comp.sys.sgi.marketplace

Some SGI related groups that may be of interest:

• MIPS discussions: comp.sys.mips

• Generic computer graphics discussions: comp.graphics

• The comp.unix heirarchy: comp.unix

• Zmail and friends: comp.mail.zmail

• The X heirarchy can sometimes be helpful, too: comp.windows.x

Archives of comp.sys.sgi can be found here:

• ftp://ftp.sgi.com/comp.sys.sgi/

• http://hornet.mmg.uci.edu/~hjm/projects/sgi.wais.html – currently appears to be dead :-(

Archives of comp.sys.mips can also be found at these sites:

• ftp://ftp.sgi.com/comp.sys.mips/

Until the introduction of the Octane, the Indigo 2 was SGI’s top end workstation. However, performance is still excellent and it still makes a very fast and useable workstation. Recently, prices have been plummeting, and an R10000 MaxImpact Indigo 2 represents superb value for money.

There are two different variants of the Indigo 2 – one with a green (called teal) case, and one with a purple case. RAM, CPU types, and graphics options available vary between the two.

There are other CPU options, mostly the older R4000 and R4600 processors, which have the same specification as those available to the Indy. More can be found here.

You can upgrade an R4400 Indigo 2 to an R10000 processor. You will need a new motherboard, new powersupply, new processor module (duh! :-) and you may also need to replace the expansion backplane. However, it would probably work out cheaper to just sell your old machine and buy a newer one.

RAM:

R4400 based Indigo 2 machines have 12 SIMM slots, giving 3 banks of 4 slots. They can take 4mb, 8mb, 16mb or 32mb 72pin parity SIMMs, giving a total of 384mb.

R10000 based Indigo 2 machines also have 12 SIMM slots, with 3 banks of 4 slots. They can take all the above SIMM sizes (again, 72pin parity) but can also take 64mb SIMMs, giving a total of 768mb RAM.

It appears it is possible to squeeze in 1GB RAM into late model R10k machines – Ian’s site has the info here.

Graphics options:

This is the tricky one :-) The Indigo 2 has a wealth of different graphics options, and two different expansion backplanes that support different options.

The earlier, green (called Teal) cased Indigo 2 has the following options:

• 24bit XL – no hardware acceleration, basically a 2D card

• 24bit XZ – 2 geometry engines, hardware Z buffers

• 24bit EX (Extreme Graphics) – 8 geometry engines, hardware Z buffers

Later Teal Indigo 2s had an upgraded XZ card with 4 GEs, although I’ve never seen one.

The later, purple cased Indigo 2 has the following options:

• Solid Impact – 1 GE(1), 1 RE(2), no hardware texture mapping

• High Impact – 1 GE, 1 RE, hardware texture mapping, 1MB or 4MB TRAM(3)

• High Impact (High-AA)(4) – 2 GEs, 1 RE, hardware texture mapping, 1MB or 4MB TRAM

• Max Impact – 2 GEs, 2 REs, hardware texture mapping, 1MB or 4MB TRAM

(1) GE – Geometry Engine
(2) RE – Raster Engine
(3) TRAM – Texture RAM
(4) The High-AA board is a bit rare, and I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere in SGI literature, but it’s basically a High Impact that carries out some operations at Max Impact speeds (most notably Anti-Aliasing, hence the AA)

Note that it’s possible to mix and match graphics boards to create a dual-head workstation. A Max-Impact/Solic Impact R10k is a truly splendid workstation :-)

If you want to upgrade a teal Indigo 2 to IMPACT graphics, you not only need to get the required board sets, but you will also need to replace the expansion backplane, and probably the power supply as well.

Ports:

• External fast SCSI (2nd channel)

• 2 Mac-compatible serial ports (RS422)

• PS/2 keyboard and mouse

• 10-BaseT or AUI ethernet

• Audio I/O (microphone, headphone, line-in, etc.)

• Bi-directional parallel port

• 3 EISA slots, and 2 GIO-64 slots

Drives:

The Indigo 2 has a decent amount of space inside for various drive configurations. There is space for 2 3.5″ hard drives, an externally accessible 5.25″ slot for a CD drive, and an externally accessible 3.5″ full height slot, for either a Floptical drive, or a DAT drive.
The internal devices are connected to one SCSI channel, and the external devices are connected to another, so you can spread devices across 2 seperate channels to improve I/O performance if needed.

All 3.5" and 5.25" devices are mounting on custom SGI sleds. These sleds present a 50pin SCSI cable to the device, and have a custom 80pin connecter which plugs into the Indigo2 chassis – it looks like SCA.

The internal SCSI bus is SCSI-2 10mb/s. Any non-HVD drive will work in an Indigo2. If the drive doesn’t have a 50pin connector, who will need to buy and fit a converter. However, note that the combined depth of a hard drive + converter may be too much to fit on the sleds.

More information:

• Greg Douglas of Reputable has archived some excellent posts explaining the various graphics options.

  A detailed overview of green (Teal) Indigo 2 graphics options can be found here:
  http://www.reputable.com/indigogfx.txt

  A detailed overview of the various IMPACT graphics sets is here:
  http://www.reputable.com/impact.txt

• Ian Mapleson has an excellent set of links for all sorts of information about the Indigo 2. It can be found at:
  http://www.futuretech.blinkenlights.nl/indigo2/

Owner’s Guides and Datasheets

The Owner’s Guide for the Indigo2 can be found on Techpubs, as can the Owner’s Guide for the Indigo2 Impact.

A local copy for the Indigo2 can be found here , as well as for the Indigo2 Impact.

A local copy of the Indigo2 Impact datasheet can be found here.

The Challenge S is SGI’s entry level server. It is essentially an Indy, with some key parts removed, and some added.

The Challenge S is designed to run as a headless server – as such, it has no ports for a keyboard, mouse, or video out. It also lacks the S-Video in and IndyCam in ports that the Indy has, and also has no sound.

The other main difference is that the primary ethernet port on the Challenge S is AUI – on the Indy it is 10-BaseT. This means that you’ll need to get an AUI transciever if you want to connect to a 10-BaseT or 10-Base2 network on the primary port. However, the Challenge S does come as standard with the Mezzanine SCSI board.

This is a single height GIO board, with 2 fast-wide-differential SCSI ports (providing 2 seperate channels) and a 10-BaseT ethernet port.

Serial port A is where you should plug in a serial terminal to administer the machine. This is deemed the ‘console’ port. I’ve used everything from wretched old VT100 terms, through console networks, to a Palm Pilot.

As it’s based on the Indy, upgrades are very easy. The Challenge S will take the same memory, hard drives, and CPU modules as an Indy. As it shares the same PROM, it could even be configure to have the console as a graphics card. There is room to fit one, even with the Mezzanine card fitted.

More information can be found on the Indy model summary page.

Summary:

• Max. 256mb RAM, as in the Indy

• No keyboard or mouse port

• No graphics card, so no monitor

• No Video input, and no sound

• Mezzanine SCSI board, with twin SCSI channels and 1 10-BaseT port

• Otherwise a standard Indy

Owner’s Guides

The Challenge S Owner’s Guide can be found on Techpubs.

A local copy can be found here.