[trekiej]

What is a good price for a Prism?
What a broad statement.

[lunatic]

I would say that depends on the size of the Prism.
But honestly, I think that a Prism has so little actual value that you will pay a collector's price. There is little reasoning behind that.

[trekiej]

I should have said Desk Side.
Is porting to Itanium any more difficult than any other processor?

[lunatic]

a deskside machine is nice. I actually haven't seen one around here.
It depends on what you mean by porting to Itanium. On a higher level, this is just another little endian 64bit CPU running Linux. You entrust everything to the compiler and it usually just works. On a lower level, the Prism is probably more problematic, because you get essentially an Origin 350 with an Itanium CPU. Writing device drivers or finishing the long awaited NetBSD port will be more difficult. The biggest problem is being stuck with old software. If you want graphics - and that's really the point of the Prism - you have to run SuSE Linux enterprise server 9 SP3, because SGI has released the necessary drivers (SGI ProPack) as closed source. SLES 9 wasn't a bad version, but it's really old with a kernel 2.6.

[trekiej]

a deskside machine is nice. I actually haven't seen one around here.
It depends on what you mean by porting to Itanium. On a higher level, this is just another little endian 64bit CPU running Linux. You entrust everything to the compiler and it usually just works. On a lower level, the Prism is probably more problematic, because you get essentially an Origin 350 with an Itanium CPU. Writing device drivers or finishing the long awaited NetBSD port will be more difficult. The biggest problem is being stuck with old software. If you want graphics - and that's really the point of the Prism - you have to run SuSE Linux enterprise server 9 SP3, because SGI has released the necessary drivers (SGI ProPack) as closed source. SLES 9 wasn't a bad version, but it's really old with a kernel 2.6.

I was thinking at the time was porting apps. from Linux x86, X86_64 to Linux Itanium.
I guess all intel cpu have the same Endian type.

[lunatic]

at least all the Intel CPUs I know (back to i860) were little endian.
Anyway, since on Itanium everything was designed to depend heavily on compiler optimization, there was so little need to get into the details. Performance was pretty good in most cases. Even the first Itaniums (Merced) weren't all that bad for a 64bit CPU. It was the 32bit mode that always sucked and the big promise of compatibility was just not delivered on. HP also added PA-RISC compatibility in HP-UX, but they used a software emulation. That was a good solution. My memory may have been degraded over the years, but I seem to remember that SGI also offered some software based emulation to get IRIX apps running.

[trekiej]

Yes, I do remember that non 64 bit apps did not run as good as it should.
I think VLIW is what Merced was running.
I do not know how well it ran in the Visualization arena.

[jan-jaap]

I seem to remember that SGI also offered some software based emulation to get IRIX apps running.

It was called QuickTransit.

[trekiej]

Do you think that SGI has computers that offered what would call "Fluidic Computing"?
That the machine was not sluggish and would handle large data sets and visualize them.

[vishnu]

Do you think that SGI has computers that offered what would call "Fluidic Computing"?

More commonly called "fluid hydrodynamics," but yes SGI supercomputers are used for that. For example the US Navy used a modified version of OpenFOAM (that they called NavyFOAM) on a 10,752 core Altix (computer named "Harold" at the Army Research Lab in Aberdeen, Maryland):

https://www.arl.army.mil/www/default.cfm?article=523

https://ndiastorage.blob.core.usgovcloud...3_Rhee.pdf