The £1Million Supercomputer Extreme Teardown

[Homer J Simpson]

[janoc]

Ah yes, SGI. These guys knew how to build computers.

Back in the day I used to run a lab full of SGI machines, including an Onyx which was a rack similar to the one in the video. Those machines were joy to maintain, rugged, super reliable and easy to repair (well, swap components). Everything on connectors, attached directly to a backplane. Not like PCs with cables everywhere, even in servers. Upgrading a CPU on an SGI machine was 10 minute job, including the motherboard removal.

Probably the only company with somewhat comparable build quality used to be Sun, on some of their servers.

[KE5FX]

Ah yes, SGI. These guys knew how to build computers.

Yeah, they built it to last decades, like all the best hardware has traditionally been built.  The idea that a machine that was so well-engineered in the early 2000s is already worth nothing beyond its scrap value is genuinely disturbing. 

We're used to computers from the 60s and 70s being treated as antique relics, and most of us have made our peace with that.  The world moves on.  But then he pops the heat spreader off one of the Itanium chips, and it looks like an alien artifact made from some kind of holographic thin film.  And it's already junk. (Well, Itanic was junk before the first one rolled out of the fab, but never mind that.)

Very thought-provoking video, thanks for posting it. 

[Towger]

He never said what os it used.  Was this basically a big PC?  Version of Windows NT at a the time had builds for intel itanium processors.

[Dielectric]

He never said what os it used.  Was this basically a big PC?  Version of Windows NT at a the time had builds for intel itanium processors.

Linux, RHEL probably.  Too new for IRIX, and I don't think they put that on Itanium machines anyway.

[helius]

He never said what os it used.  Was this basically a big PC?  Version of Windows NT at a the time had builds for intel itanium processors.

But for 256 processors? That would surprise me.
The Altix only supported Linux (SGI contributed the code supporting more than 16 processors in a single system image to the kernel).

[janoc]

He never said what os it used.  Was this basically a big PC?  Version of Windows NT at a the time had builds for intel itanium processors.

Linux, RHEL probably.  Too new for IRIX, and I don't think they put that on Itanium machines anyway.

IRIX never supported Intel hw, that was running only on their MIPS machines. This was all Linux, likely custom version of RedHat.

But for 256 processors? That would surprise me.
The Altix only supported Linux (SGI contributed the code supporting more than 16 processors in a single system image to the kernel).

Easily, Linux supports up to 4096 CPUs:

https://www.quora.com/How-many-processors-does-Linux-support

Also don't forget that SGI is the company that actually contributed most of the multiprocessing and NUMA support to Linux.

[helius]

Do you have problems reading messages in context? I replied to a commentator asking about Windows.
You then proceeded to remind me not to forget the same fact that I wrote in the quote!

[janoc]

Do you have problems reading messages in context? I replied to a commentator asking about Windows.
You then proceeded to remind me not to forget the same fact that I wrote in the quote!

Sorry but it wasn't clear to me you are referring to Windows when speaking about the 256 CPU limit. I had also Dielectric's post in front of me when I wrote that. No need to go all crazy - not everyone is a native English speaker here.

[helius]

256 processors (or cores) refers to the Altix 4700 in the video. I am not aware of any Windows systems that large (but I am prepared to be surprised).