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Oh What To Do With My Altix450 - Printable Version

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Oh What To Do With My Altix450 - digitalIRIX - 07-28-2021

Hi all, finally have my Altix450 up and running. Currently boots SUSE V11 SP4 on mirrored 600Gb Hdd's, 32Gb Ram, 8 CPU's and an external 6TB array connected via the systems 4xSAS port. Also has an ATI FireMV 2200 graphics card installed.
I'm connecting via vnc client running on my client boxes back to it.
The disk array in an old Adaptec with 750Gb HDD's.
Also has a second IRU full of fibre controllers etc but not currently being used!
Looking for ideas on usage. May end up a file server as there appears to be no current software support on this platform.
Thoughts?
Regards
John

RE: Oh What To Do With My Altix450 - stormy - 07-30-2021

Well, yeah a file server - but it's a bit overkill for a simple NAS isn't it? I guess it isn't secure enough to be doing any kind of internet service. If I had it I'd probably donate it to a computer museum to be honest. Perhaps you could get a modern BSD running on it? Not sure.

RE: Oh What To Do With My Altix450 - digitalIRIX - 08-01-2021

Hi Stormy, yes I'm afraid you may be correct in your statement. An overkill for a NAS and I certainly wouldn't expose any of my sgi systems to the 'internet'. Possibly a donation to a computer museum is on the cards!

RE: Oh What To Do With My Altix450 - Raion - 08-01-2021

Well, here's an idea.

Donate it to a NetBSD dev down under. There's little NetBSD dev for IA-64, but they're the only BSD that even has a passing interest in it. Post to the NetBSD mailing lists offering it Smile.

RE: Oh What To Do With My Altix450 - digitalIRIX - 08-01-2021

Hi Raion, I will certainly consider this option. I also have a larger Prism system that's in a similar position to the Altix450. I will investigate further assuming down here in Oz that we can get out of these near continous government SARS -cov2 lock downs! Regards.

RE: Oh What To Do With My Altix450 - ghost180sx - 12-02-2021

(08-01-2021, 07:27 AM)digitalIRIX Wrote:  Hi Raion, I will certainly consider this option. I also have a larger Prism system that's in a similar position to the Altix450. I will investigate further assuming down here in Oz that we can get out of these near continous government SARS -cov2 lock downs! Regards.

Even a museum won't know what to do with this. I strongly urge you not to give up. The answer depends on you learning what to do with a HPC NUMA supercomputer...

By the way, I have an Onyx2 still sitting in a storage locker Melbourne right now because my friend can't get it to the docks to be shipped to Canada! I feel for you over there. I'm pulling for ya!

Realistically, the application for such a system is in learning or doing your own coding and programming. A web or file server is one application, but that can be done on any reasonable system these days; even a laptop!

Since you don't have much in terms of hardware accelerated 3D for this system, I recommend you look into HPC computer applications, for fun. You could also use it for raytracing or cluster rendering. Even though this is a single system image SMP supercomputer, you can consider it in the same way you'd treat any cluster, but you life is easier as it has NUMA shared memory.

Software Ideas:
- build mplayer/mencoder or ffmpeg and enable multi-cpu encoding. Start writing some basic scripts for converting video. Use the storage array to store converted video for playback on your other devices at home.
- madelbrot set infinite video rendering cluster: take a standard mandlebrot set generator that spits out images as frames. create a streaming video daemon that then pipes this out in continuous, infinitely travelling frames through the set you can pipe to any large video streaming enabled DVD player in your house to a large display
- povray cluster rendering. This might work but requires erlang: https://github.com/joergen7/render-farm. Here's a simpler example that just uses GNU screen, which you can build or install on any linux distro, new or old! https://www.verklagekasper.de/video/povray/parallelrender.html

HPC/Cluster programming resources
This list is very comprehensive:
https://github.com/trevor-vincent/awesome-high-performance-computing

I've ran out of time to research more for you, but I'm interested in the same topics. I have  large Xserve G4 cluster in my basement and I'm itching to do something with it myself.

RE: Oh What To Do With My Altix450 - weblacky - 12-02-2021

I do not know terribly much on this topic/machine/platform but can you get the Fibre controllers to operate in target mode? Similar to Linux Project SCST: http://scst.sourceforge.net/

I've done this before on regular PCs back in 2007, but I don't know if your fiber controllers are supported. Basically I'd suggest trying to turn it into a FC target mode SAN. Now I do not know of any SGIs that can boot from FC (please let me know if I'm wrong!!!) so you likely cannot do booting. But as secondary drives, backups, versions, images, dumps, etc... you can do virtual storage area network-style volumes. Also for PCs that DO SUPPORT FC booting, I've booted both Windows XP and Vista (again back in 2007-ish) straight from an FC controller HBA (so diskless station) and it allowed simply image swap and such. It was very cool. You'd not have to keep it running all the time, just run it when you want to FC play :-)

That was a long time ago for me and I don't have a SCST setup right now (though I have all the hardware). You could also use a SHARED FC drive to try our SGI clustering FS tools?

Anyway, those are my thoughts...but yeah...I'm a collector so I have no thoughts about actually running this stuff usefully, full-time. I'd not want to put those kind of hours on the hardware anyway.