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Quake First Person Shooters (Games)

Id Auctioning Off SGI That Created Q2 And Q3A 111

Posted by CmdrTaco from the only-for-the-truly-obsessive dept.
shiwala writes: "id software is auctioning the SGI Origin 2000 used to process all of the map data for Quake II and Quake III Arena." Hemos and I have been debating auctioning off the case that was the 2nd Slashdot (for a six months). I've been trying to find the alpha that was Slashdot for the first 9 months of its life (it served the first million pages: if I only knew that we would serve that many pages every day). Probably donate the $ to the FSF or Project Gutenberg or something. Anyway this id box amuses me: opening bid is $7500.
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Id Auctioning Off SGI That Created Q2 and Q3A More

Id Auctioning Off SGI That Created Q2 and Q3A

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  • That would be a neat feat since the Origin 2000 was first released in 1996 which, last time I checked, was less than 5 years ago..... As for woefully archaic, find me another machine that scales to 512 processor in a single system image. Have you ever *really* used an SGI Origin 2000???

  • In an unrelated story... (Score:3)

    by Valar ( 167606 ) on Saturday July 22, 2000 @07:58AM (#913438)
    Microsoft held an auction over the weekend for the computer on which the first Windows was designed. It sold for $.50, was taken into the parking lot, and burned. Bill Gates was seen, later that day, crying over the loss of his 'baby' and screaming 'First my company, then my dearest!'.
  • Quick, someone snatch this one up for distributed.net!

    What in God's name could they have done to it to make half the processors die? That's an expensive mistake!
  • Yes - go to oss.sgi.com and look at "Ports". The mips64 port of Linux runs on the Origin 200/2000. In fact, I was running it on an 8p Origin yesterday.
  • I'm surprised they didn't try to auction off Paul Steed!
  • What a moronic troll. The *processor* is what's slow, not the OS. And BTW - Linux runs on this piece of hardware so you just contradicted yourself. Titanic was generated on Alpha processors that happened to be running Linux. Much as I hate to admit it, they probably could have gone just as fast had they been Alphas running NT (except that they probably would have had to reinstall the OS a bunch of times :) That had way more to do with the speed than the OS since rendering is just a huge number crunching application. The machine in this article doesn't even have a graphics card. My SGI, BTW, *can* get 80+ fps. So there.

    Lastly, compare Infinite Reality 3 graphics with *any* PC graphics card. The PC crap won't even come *close* to catching it.

  • Auction: id software selling used fridge (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Yes, thats right, id software is selling the fridge that housed their bevrages while making Quake2 and Quake3.

    Starting bid, $7,500.

    Note: 4/8 lightbulbs dead.

    from Scancode
  • This machine is mine baby! :)

    Just wondering though, why does it say seller pays shipping in the header, then in the description ID is saying I have to pay the shipping???

    This did not compute
  • I think it was about $ 700k.

    I wonder what they're replacing it with. If I had one of those things, I'd really hate to see it go - they have panache.

    D

    ----
  • For an example of a *really* huge cluster of these machines, check out the ASCI project at LANL. They have a cluster of 48 nodes of Origin 2000 where each node has 128 processors. It's not Beowulf, but it's similar in that you can run an MPI job across the cluster.
  • Confusious eyes a trend:

    Maybe Corel can auction off Wine machines (that Corel office first emulated on) to make payroll around October time.

    Or maybe Confusious will auction off his new Athlon with 256 MB ram that has been rumored to run Star Office 5.2 and Mozilla at the same time (with almost enough memory and MIPS left for Confusious to play Mahjongg)...mmmm...sweeet

  • Re:It's a supercomputer that's why! (Score:4)

    by Shoeboy ( 16224 ) on Saturday July 22, 2000 @12:06PM (#913448) Homepage
    a shared memory supercomputer, even to today's standard...you may have to add more processors though.
    With Apple claiming the G4 as supercomputer, you will actually need to subtract processors from your Origin to make it meet todays standard of supercomputing.
    --Shoeboy
  • Deep space tech (www.deepspeacetech.com) sells refurbished NeXT machines.

  • If it uses anywhere near 30A @ 240 it uses power like a crappy central A/C. Think about 7.2KWh, or at today's residential rates, just over $4k per year.

    Do you really get that much computing out of it? I've got a P133 with 6 SCSI drives that I don't run because its just too damned expensive.
  • It does support multi-module. I've tried it on a two module system and it boots fine. I'll probably try it on a 4 module system at some point in the near future. It does have some *cough* issues, though. The error handling for errors that come from Hub (the ASIC that runs the ccNUMA protocol between node boards). In fact there are some errors that I can't even figure out where the interrupts are going to... But overall, it seems to be fairly stable and supports at least the Base I/O card that runs most of the ports on O2k. Not sure how well it performs on Onyx2 (I'd imagine it won't support Infinite Reality gfx, but it should support booting since the hardware is the same as Origin 2000).
  • With the way Unix does load averages, a load of 20 means that you are running 20 processors full boar and the other 172 processors are just sitting around running idle. The machine would be really responsive up to a load of 191. Then things would start slowing down, but the same would happen on any single processor system when the load goes over 1.

    What you noticed about the machine plodding through code (but a lot of it at once) is because the point of Origin is for parallel programs. The fastest way to run a program with n threads is on an n processor machine (neglecting other activity). So, if you aren't writing parallel code, you get basically no benefit from a parallel system. The way to speed up single thread code in the supercomputing world is to run on a vector based system.

  • Yeah - that's what I get for posting before I'm fully awake :) There is no Origin 2010. There is no backside cache on Origin. Spinlock support has always been in Origin - that's what the "cc" part of "ccNUMA" gets you.... But the best is where he claims that 1998 was 5 years ago :)
  • Wait till next year. It's going to cost a lot though :) We're working on the clustering software for it now. CrayLink is now called NUMAlink, BTW.

  • Think about the number of levels in Quake 2 or Quake 3, and the number of times they need to be compiled before they're complete, and that's quite a bit of computing time. Especially when the game has deadlines, and levels often have to be rebuild due to changing requirements/features of the game engine. Level designers who are designing levels for an in-progress game will tell you that it's much harder (and levels require many more builds) than when you're working with a finished, stable game engine.

    There are, what, 50 maps in Quake 2? If each one takes a couple of hours to build, that's a little over 4 days to build them all a single time. It's possible that the tools they used on that Origin 2000 were more accurate and slower (comparitively) than the Intel/win32 equivalents, so that could require more computing power also. You can see how it would all add up to a lot of computing time... and obviously you don't want to be building levels on the same machine the designer is still trying to work on...

  • got any good urls for info on this?

    .brad

    Drink more tea
    organicgreenteas.com [organicgreenteas.com]
  • Why not give it to SETI@home and let them do some of their own darn work? Or -- better yet -- give it to that Martinez Troll and have him/her/it use it to end world hunger.

    Yeah, that's the ticket.

  • ok, I'll take your word for it then.

    I'm sorry, I had thought that you were trolling.

    -----
  • It must be Erwin's cousin.
  • 8) SETI@Home cruncher 9) I am my own team for the Distributed Net challenge 10) Maybe I can finally fix the code to Unreal. Maybe not 11) Put it in the closet? My patch pannel is in there! 12) Keep MIT dorm rooms cool in Winter. 13) Surprise, Windows doesn't run. 14) CPUs out? Who put the Mountain Dw too close to the machine. 15)This article is already 4 days old. DO I honestly feel that anyone is going to read my post?

  • .plan entries (Score:3)

    by philj ( 13777 ) on Saturday July 22, 2000 @08:02AM (#913461)
    Here [bluesnews.com] is one of the .plan anouncements that first pointed to it, and
    here [idsoftware.com] are a few pictures of the actual machine.
  • that's a big system.

    I'm sure somebody will get a good deal on it.

    how much was one of them things when it was spankin new?

    ________

  • This is a really interesting point!

    Now, there *are* professional bidders already, of course, but they're not something the ordinary Joe gets to use. There are specialized professional bidders in all kinds of esoteric things, but of course that's not what you're talking about. The interesting thing about near-simultaneous, wide-ranging electronic communications is that the level at which it's practical to have things like this creeps lower -- you don't have to be as rich to use such services if you're paying incrementally in combination with other people (services like ubid.com), and the actual bidding services can be done cheaper and for products for which it wouldn't have made sense a few years ago. (priceline.com, for instance -- groceries etc).

    Even pricewatch.com can be seen as a sort of reverse auction, where you can say "Gee, I'm looking for a D-Link PCMCIA modem / ethernet card. Wonder who can give me the best deal on one?" -- BAM a few search terms later, you find one ($128, as of yesterday). Much nicer than trying to sort through dozens of sites for a few bucks' difference.

    And the new-economy thing I want to see most is the chance to "roll for more" as featured in R. Heinlein's "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress." It's been a few years, but I believe the basic concept is, when buying anything from a meal to a motel room, it's traditional to pay slightly more in exchange for the chance to win it for free instead. It's gambling, so the house wins (in aggregate) but the player sometimes wins, and to the player wins large. (I'd like that at Motel 6, for instance ... am I feeling ... lucky?)

    Of course, given current ridiculous attitudes about gambling this isn't likely to happen, but ...

    simon
  • I wonder how much in-house squabbling it took for that one to come about :)

    Enditallnow

  • Not necissarily -- quake 2 certainly wasn't a very good game.
  • Whole new services might even appear where people pay fixed fees to 'professional bidders' who would take care of the whole bidding process for them. This would appeal to people who just want to buy stuff, and would create a whole new career.

    Errrr ... you mean the way stock exchanges and commodity markets work right now, for instance?

    It looks to me like you're predicting that once we disintermediate everything we're going to find it's TOO DAMN MUCH HASSLE to live without the dissed intermediaries and we're going to reintermediate right back.

    I think I'm with you on that, actually. Now, how can we make an IPO out of this?
  • .. To prop open the door to the barn! And I'd use the 8 dead processors to make up some funky earings.. and the 8 live processors to.. um.. Process Map Data.. Yeah.

    -
  • Uh, ok -I have never even *heard* of the Origin 2010, nor can I find *any* mention of it anywhere in the Irix kernel code, which I look at/modify on a daily basis. Spinlock support has been available, AFAIK, since the first day Origin shipped - it's kinda necessary to support an OS boot. And I've never heard of a backside cache on any of our systems. Origin, BTW, is not SMP - it's NUMA. As for getting one several years before it was publicly released, I wasn't at SGI then, so I don't know what the Origin beta program was like, but the current machines in beta *certainly* weren't ready to ship 2 years ago in beta.

    And no, I haven't rendered a 3D game myself (though I have written a few simple Open GL programs). However, I *do* work with Origin hardware and software *every* day since my group is responsible for kernel support on it.

    I will ask some people Monday, though, about the 2010 and I'll post more then (if anyone's actually heard of it...)

  • With Apple claiming the G4 as supercomputer, you will actually need to subtract processors from your Origin to make it meet todays standard of supercomputing.
    I think that it is more due to the fact that the word "supercomputer" itself is very ambiguous. Every Tom, Dick and Beowulf user tend to use it these days. Like many people, my colleagues and I prefer the term HPC for High Performance Computer/Computing. According to the comp.sys.super [comp.sys.super] newsgroup FAQ:
    What's constitutes a supercomputer?
    -----------------------------------
    What makes a supercomputer?
    ===========================
    The fastest, most powerful machine to solve a problem today. Generally credited to Dr. Sid Fernbach, George Michael and and Jack Worlton, and others.

    What if I qualify that with "cost?"
    -----------------------------------
    Then, it's not a supercomputer. Period. It might be a minisupercomputer, though. Don't let George know that I said that (he's much more hardline).
  • Here [spec.org] Is the spec results of a Origin 200 360mhz R12k.
    Here [spec.org] is a dell PIII 733.
    You'll find the PIII system has better intger proformance and the Origin better floating point proformance. But, the tests are run only using _one_ cpu... and from I read in previous posts the origin is focusing on really fast IO.
  • Wow! iD sells an item and they don't even have to pay for advertising.
  • Offer not valid in UT,

    Aw... come on, why not?

    Because IBMs, like coffee, porn, and enjoying life, are against the Mormon religion. He doesn't want to face the wrath of one of the richest cults in the world.
    --
  • Dude, I'm sorry for you. This was a troll and you fed him.
  • i have a 192 CPU O2K where i work..usually we have 60 or so users, load average is around 20 or so. those are 192 250MHz R10Ks. usually with a load average of 20 the machine is about as responsive as a 300MHz P-II running linux (most of the processors are unloaded even at a load of 20). however, you can start a helluva lot of background jobs and its still as responsive as a 300MHz P-II. performance doesnt degrade, but it doesnt get faster either. also simple things like loading files, displaying directories etc are much faster than my 10K RPM ultra scsi drive under linux. its a bit weird initially - i was expecting this chunk of massive hardware to burn thru all my code like it didnt exist instead of plodding along - but it plods along with a helluva lot of bandwidth.

  • I remember, several years ago, a posting on comp.sys.next.marketplace. It may have been Carmack. They were selling off their original NeXT hardware, which had been used to develop DOOM.

    I still have my color NeXT machine, and it served many years of use. When I replaced it with a 200MHz Pentium Pro system (running RH4.1), the PPro machine was roughly 20x faster than the old NeXT machine.
  • If I had the money I'd still be interested in an SGI that can create games that make that much money. Who cares if the games suck ass as long as you collect the bucks.

  • The web site for that SGI-made beauty is here (http://www.sgi.com/origin/2000/ [sgi.com]), and a picture of it is here (http://www.sgi.com/origin/2000/ima g es/2400L.jpg [sgi.com]).
  • There was a time when paintings and sculptures were overvalued, then it was celebrity hand-offs. Now the geeks have the money and it's machines otherwise headed for the scrap pile that will sell for a lot of money.

    I'm waiting for the Jon Katz article about how the distribution of wealth among geeks suffering from a post-Columbine syndrome has led to the artificial valuation of tools of technology.
  • Read it & weep...

  • Excuse me? Read that tagline up top again "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters". Id Software helped launch a gaming revolution that has had a signifigant impact on the computer graphics industry and which has brought many new people into the field. I personally know several programmers and web application developers who got their start by coding mods or putting together fan pages for the Doom and Quake series of games. Id Software is a company that many 'nerds' are interested in, and therefore news about them is 'News for Nerds'. While this isn't a gaming site and I'd probably get upset if they started reporting on every new mod release and .plan comment made by one of the Id employees, Slashdot is entirely within its scope when it reports on 'out of the ordinary' happenings withing the company. Selling off an Origin 2000 supercomputer that played a hand in developing two of their most popular games definitely qualifies as 'out of the ordinary'. Besides, there are no rules outlining what IS and ISN'T acceptable content here. If Taco wants to post a story about his cats furry butt, he has that right. If the other members of the /. team don't see reason to censure him, then he can go on posting whatever he sees fit. You aren't paying for this service, so why are you complaining about it? If you don't like it, find somewhere else to post. If you really want to express your opinion, or think you could do a better job, go download the source code [slashdot.org] and build your own site.

  • Re:To compare (Score:3)

    by Pengo ( 28814 ) on Saturday July 22, 2000 @10:14PM (#913481) Journal

    It's not just the raw-cpu power of these things but the internal-bandwidth the ccNuMA architecture can support.

    I guess as it goes today, they are a bit out-dated on the processor level, but would still make a fantastic file server. (That spec of Origin can maintain about 2 gigabyte of sustained internal bandwidth per second. A top end 1Ghz Athlon can only sustain about 800mb per second on the bus.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I could have sworn reading a .plan file that carmack posted saying something about those NeXT boxes to the effect of 'first four people to get down here will go home with one NeXT box'. That was a real cool thing of them to do. I wonder why id feels they need to sell that puppy. You would figure John to donate that or something. A box like that would make a great donation to FSF for example and I would guess that the donation would be tax deductable to boot.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • No it's not.
  • "Lastly, compare Infinite Reality 3 graphics with *any* PC graphics card. The PC crap won't even come *close* to catching it."

    In case anyone thinks this is nonsense, remember that the low-end single user workstation that SGI recently released had a custom made souped up 64Mb nVidia Quadro card on it that makes your average DDR GeForce look slow. That thing is fast...
  • 1: This thing is HUGE. Your floor might not hold it up. 2: Heat. 3: It's power requirements are probably sufficient that you can't use it in a residential zone. 4: Even if you tried, it probably draws more than your wall outlet will put out.
  • Sounds pretty nifty, I have to wonder what the memory architecture will look like in those beasts. Think if I drop by SGI they'll let me play with it? :-) (j/k)

  • But the real question is... (Score:4)

    by MalaclypseJr ( 134881 ) on Saturday July 22, 2000 @07:27AM (#913489) Homepage
    Do they wipe it when they auction it off?
    Or do we finally get their sgi compile tools?
    I know quite a few mappers with 64 processor sgi machines that want to know ;)
  • "it would probably end up in a trash" If you know people throwing out systems with a second-hand going rate of $15k-plus (see other posts), then I suggest you get dumpster diving asap. When id got rid of their NeXT machines (wonderful, lovely things that they were, with officially the nicest GUI ever) they gave them away because the underlying 16MHz 68020 processors weren't actually up much in comparison to current machines. This one is a bit different - I'm sure that if this was so out of date that it was worthless they wouldn't have used it as the main number cruncher for Q3A.
  • Gee, I thought programmers created Quake. Well, I guess artifical intelligence is a further than I thought.

  • Obligatory Poll Mastah Poll (Score:3)

    by PollMastah ( 174649 ) on Saturday July 22, 2000 @07:36AM (#913492) Homepage

    Poll: how many people are interested in this SGI box?

    1. I want it!
    2. What's the current bid on it? Are they bidding on eBay?
    3. Does it come with the Quake SGI tools?
    4. Gah, who cares. Slashdot is boring.
    5. Oh no!! Id is going bankrupt! I mean, heck, with Corel selling the peripheral business and Id auctioning off their computers, the IT industry is collapsing! Aaarrrgghh!!!
    6. (RMS voice imitation:) I hereby declare this SGI Box the GNU/Quake GNU/SGI workstation!
    7. Segmentation fault
      Caffeine underflow
      Brain dumped
  • Ok, I lied. It turns out it's just an internal SGI thing for now. Check out http://reality.sgi.com/rhess_engr/q3a/irix/ for more info. "Any Day Now" is the official party line. :)

    -Chris

  • i'm in this too (Score:3)

    by fluxrad ( 125130 ) on Saturday July 22, 2000 @07:36AM (#913494)
    ladies and gentlemen...i, FluXraD, am auctioning off the first ever computer i installed linux on

    a beautiful IBM Craptiva with an enormous 64 meg of RAM, a beautifully stylish mobo with onboard crystal sound and an ATI Rage video card (you guessed it: the 2meg) This beautiful desktop unit is fully functional, it can be used as BOTH a paperweight for those outside offices, or a projectile. Either way, you'll be a winner with this baby!

    Bidding will start next week...reserve is a bargain at a low low $32k. (Make checks payable to the FluXraD retirement fund. Seller makes no guarantee of implied warranty or viability of said IBM Craptiva. Purchaser takes product as is with no refunds unless expressly stated. Upon return a %100 stocking fee may be charged the buyer. Offer not valid in UT, VT, TX and The People's Republic of China)


    FluX
    After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
  • That's about the diagnosis I expected. I'm planning on installing on a 3-module Onyx2 system (plus an IR2 graphics head, but that certainly won't be doing much... unless xf86 supports things that I don't know it does... :> ) and on an Onyx2 deskside, both in a couple weeks. I just want to see how it goes and how everything looks.

    Then I'll work on forcing gr_osview to work and turning on the distributed.net client so we can REALLY see how good it's doing. :)

    -Chris

  • Well, why not? (Score:5)

    by Chairboy ( 88841 ) on Saturday July 22, 2000 @07:40AM (#913496) Homepage
    I would like to announce the auctioning of the first computer I ever used to chat in an adult IRC chat room. It's a Mac 512ke that works fine, but the keyboard is a bit... sticky.

    Back on topic....

    Could the Auction will become the defacto engine behind the new economy?

    In a way, we'd come full circle. In the beginning, purchases were bartered for. Two people would negotiate back and forth until the price was agreed on. Eventually, fixed prices started to replace this. Money became the accepted tender, and everyone was happy.

    Now, however, it's becoming easy to do the bartering without the social interaction, bluffing, etc. Stores could set an opening bid on the things they wanted to sell. When demand went up, the prices would go up, but not because they raised prices, instead because customers would bid against each other.

    Eventually, people might bid against each other from whatever evolves from web-enabled cell phones or bluetooth devices. The winner would get the goods right then, and the loser would need to wander around the store waiting for the next bidding cycle to start on that item. On the plus side, the customer might be able to snake great bargains if they come in at off peak hours, reducing the mob scene you find in stores between 5-7PM. People who needed to shop at peak hours would pay for the convenience, bidding against other people of like-mind.

    Whole new services might even appear where people pay fixed fees to 'professional bidders' who would take care of the whole bidding process for them. This would appeal to people who just want to buy stuff, and would create a whole new career.

    Maybe it's our destiny to go back to our roots, economically...
  • ...for Apple to buy SGI. They wouldn't have to redesign the machines.

  • Well, to answer question 1, SGI wants $20K for a used system with fewer, slower processors ( Link here [sgi.com] ).

    --
    Email address is real.

  • It's a supercomputer that's why! (Score:5)

    by theHippo ( 28682 ) on Saturday July 22, 2000 @08:15AM (#913499)
    Even if Id isn't the one auctioning it, it still is news! I'm surprise to see an Origin2000 being auctioned! This is a very expensive piece of equipment and actually is a shared memory supercomputer, even to today's standard...you may have to add more processors though. Although per-processor wise it is not as fast as the current fastest PIIIs, this is a fine grained shared memory machine, unlike Beowulf clusters which have a distributed memory coarse grained architecture. At 200 Mhz per R10k, it still has got a lot of life in it...look at the Top 500 [top500.org] site for more info. Also the R10000 are 64-bit processors, and SGI's compilers does take advantage of this fact so if you need higher-accuracy computation than this is the way to go. I predict that this system will go for at least 100k+ considering the prices the prices that the four-processor little brother O200 systems are going for at the moment.

    According to the 1998 review [unixreview.com] of a Sun Enterprise 10000 at UnixReview (previously Performance Computing)

    Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) has published results for its Origin2000, a cache-coherent Non-Uniform Memory Architecture (ccNUMA) system, of 9,478 for SPECfp_rate95 and 5,922 for SPECint_rate95, both for system configurations with 64 195MHz Mips R10000 CPUs. The SGI floating-point score was on a system with 16GB RAM, while the integer score was obtained on a system with 48GB RAM. The SGI machine's floating-point performance is significantly higher than Sun's, while the Origin2000's integer performance is only slightly higher than the Starfire's. Additionally, SGI issued a press release on Feb. 25, 1998 announcing SPECrate scores for its latest 250MHz Mips R10000 CPU of 11,984 for SPECfp_rate95 and 8,021 for SPECint_rate95. At review time, however, those results had not yet been posted on the SPEC Web site, so configuration details of the test systems were not available.

  • It's publicity what else. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If this wasn't coming from a well known source, (i.e.: "id") it would probably end up in a trash or (hopfuly) in a charity.

    I belive, "id" would server it's community better if they gave it away for to an art school -- does "id" realy needs the money?!

    -- George

  • Back in the good times

    What are you talking about, mister 203477?
    It sure doesn't look like you've been here all that long, does it?

    -----
  • Actually, it probably uses a 30A plug -- 20A if you're lucky. Even at 30A, you could rewire a clothes dryer or oven circuit to power it. Better yet, though -- just ask any decent electrician to run a new circuit for you.

    With half the processors dead, chances are that you could pull the dead boards and coax it to run on a 15A circuit (as long as you didn't have much/anything else on the circuit) Kitchen counter plugs are a good bet, since most building codes require each plug to be on a separate circuit.

    The heat issue is real, though. I worked with an SGI crimson once, in a small room with not enough air conditioning to handle the output of the thing. At night we had to close the door to the room, and the temperature would consistently hit ~35C (~95F) (this was in Vancouver, not Phoenix). One night it got so hot that a termal protection fuse blew. It stumped the SGI service guy for a while (he didn't know about the thermal fuse).

    Due to bureaucratic heel-dragging, it took almsost 6 months to upgrade the air conditioning in the room.

    I don't know why it's power requirements would stop you from using it in a residential neighbourhoood, but chancces are that it's only FCC 15B (industrial) rated. -- I mean, who's going to put an Onyx in their basement?? (OK, put your hand down, I take that back!)

  • heh. Are you sure that you can afford the 7500 watts it sucks... and the air conditioning to get rid of that 7500 watts? (Another ~10000 or so watts)

    -----
  • I'll give you $20 for it :)
  • I wonder if SGI will start putting those Cray-Link interfaces on the SGI/Linux boxen :-) Now THAT would make a cluster... Not likely in any case, but we can dream.
  • And Taco should not use his story posting priviledge to sell crap. What a dumbass..posting priviledge??He created this fuckin' site.If you don't like it create your own and post anything you fuckin' want.Dumb people really piss me off.
  • You are such a fuckin idiot.
  • What are you talking about, mister 203477? It sure doesn't look like you've been here all that long, does it?

    The user number in my old account (which I changed because I decided to post to /. with my real name) is under 10k. I've been around here far longer than you. I know what I'm talking about.

  • I really don't think they should sell Slashdot's second case. I mean, next thing you know, you'll be seeing some porn site with,
    "SUPER XXX HARDCORE PORN, previousily Slashdot.org."

    Then again, how many people would notice the difference? ;)

  • Id Software helped launch a gaming revolution that has had a signifigant impact on the computer graphics industry and which has brought many new people into the field.

    BS. Violent 3D computer games are an industry plain and simple, not a "revolution", which is just a word which sadly is mostly used for meaningless glorification of accomplishments that, in the great scheme of things, are totally trivial. Just like other bullshit PR terms like "paradigm shift".

  • Later in the thread "estanislao martinez" claims it remembers:

    >Back in the good times, whenever the editors
    >were thinking of making any changes to the
    >system,

    To which emmons rightfully points out that it's userID is GREATER THAN 200K.

    It has also, in the past, claimed to remember people being "out to get" shengan in the days before his (apparantly temporary(unfortunately)) banishment from the editorial pool.

    Now, my userID is in the 62K range, and I joined /. only shortly before shengan crossed the line by comendering /. as his personal soap box, and disabling comments after spewing forth a sermon about how evil the US is for it's foreign policy (enforcing the UN-mandated sanctions against iraq, IIRC).

    Clearly, no one with a 200K+ userID would have been around then. UNLESS it is a troll. "estanliao martinez" is a such a troll. It is a made up character, a fraud. You should all have realised THAT much from its posting history.

    A while back, an anonymous coward was circulating a link to "martinez"'s postings in the illicit "inchfan" forum, announcing the creation of the character. I, unfortunately, lost that link. AC, if you're there, a repost would be really cool.

    Not only all that, it SLIPS OUT OF CHARACTER when you get it pissed off! Examine this quote from it in the following story (It is archived, so you'll have to scroll down, or search for its username):

    http://slashdot.org/articles/00/06/28/1832229.sh tml

    >I repeat, I have *taught* logic. I have studied
    >First Order Logic, Dynamic Logic, Modal Logic,
    >Hybrid Logic, Type Theory, Model Theoretic
    >Semantics, Substructural Logics, Feature Logics,
    >and some more. At grad level. I'd advise you to
    >not take my knowledge here for granted.

    Note, in particular, the last sentance. Now, where have we heard THAT before? Which phony personality did it fall back to?

    Everybody remember st-st-st-steven w-w-w-woston, of "jjjjulius games", who just HAPPENS to be close, personal friends with just about EVERY major player in the industry and community, from John Carmack to Scott Draker to Linus? Gets previews of EVERY bit of new hardware? And has his contributed code to EVERYthing fron Doom to Quake3 to the Linux kernel itself? And who'se character is EVERY bit as condescending as "estanislao martinez"?

    It is baiting all of you. Quit biteing.

    Oh, if only Slashdot had killfiles....

    john
    Resistance is NOT futile!!!

    Haiku:
    I am not a drone.
    Remove the collective if

  • Q3A (Score:3)

    by the_tsi ( 19767 ) on Saturday July 22, 2000 @03:58PM (#913512)
    And the best part is... Q3A for IRIX just went alpha today. So you can have your quake and eat it, too.

    -Chris
  • The first personal/home/kit computer ever (the unit that got stolen at the airport)

    The prinout containing the first free software Bill Gates ever used. [ Known at the time as PD Basic ]

    The 386 Linus used to compile the first version of Linux.

    But getting sereous... Who cares what it was used for... It's still quite a powerful box...
    Some upgrades and pollish and it'd kick butt.

    I'd put in a bid if I thought I had a chance

    I'd offer the first computer I used but... that was shipped back to Commodore back in 1979.

    I don't want Slashdots first servers...
    I want the last retired Slash server....
    harddisk blanked of course....
  • It takes considerably more processing power to compile the original graphics than it takes to render it once everything is compiled.
    Someone sat down and worked on all those details to make every player look human. Thats a lot of work. All your PC dose is overlay a skin on a frame. Someone had to make that skin and frame.

    Also when develuping the game your working a few years ahead.
    Say your working on a game today. Your target computer is a Pentium 5. Obveously such a machine dosn't exist. So you need something equally powerful.

    The first versions of the game will not work well. A lot of hacks. A lot of unknowns. Later you go back over the code clean it up and make it work reliably. But when the code is running slow you need to run "at speed".

    There are quite a few reasons to use a computer that is far byond the target machine.

    In IDs case it was probably an upgrade consern. They didn't want to have to upgrade that machine to often. It was after all used for two versions of Quake and while it can be upgraded they probably need something a tad more powerful than a computer than a top end PC two years from now. This won't cut it.

  • 1. What's the going rate for one of these things (are they charging a premium for the sentimental value?)

    2. What's do they use as a replacement? (Probably "a cluster of ..."?)

    3. Anybody have benchmarks for this sucker?

    4. Does that come with a color monitor? (grin, Dilbert reference)

  • This woundn't be that valuable to the FSF. Not for long.
    I suspect the FSF might not want something so bulky becouse it would be so hard to get rid of once it's obsolete.
    However to a geek, a colector, a tech or a company this sucker is totally worth punking down hard cold cash...
    If ID wanted to donate that... it'd help out a lot....

    Basicly the FSF won't get the workload out of it to make it worth the space it would end up taking up.
  • ... and I'll put it in my closet. It couldn't be much worse than having a few VAXes in there.
  • Eeeh... I see the point :)

    First no ID won't make a proffit. The cost of the replacment system will eat up any proffits ID makes.
    So really there is no money to be made. It's a cost reduction yeah but it isn't enough.

    ID would probably make more on goodwill in a donation of this bad boy that they would in capital from a sale.

    But... It wouldn't benifit the FSF much at all and it takes up a lot of space.
    It may not even be welcomed at the FSF.
    What they need is new hardware not fast hardware. ID can write Pentium 5 code using a fast super compuyer FSF must have a real P5 and specs or it won't make much of a diffrence.

    At issue. the FSF needs to do stuff like optomise the GCC compiler to run under new processors. The code isn't slow itself and still compiles and runs reasonably under a 386.
    ID however is working on next generation graphics technology and needs computers as powerful as the ones we'll be using 2 to 3 years from now.

    FSF needs to be able to compile and test P5 optomise code on a real P5.

    ID just needs something as fast as so they can test the engen.

    Once ID is readly to ship they'll rely on a compuler that has allready been optomised for the latest PCs. ID dosn't need to worry about that layer of technology.

    In short the FSF would probably frown on a donation of such a box as it's unlikely anyone using such a box would need free software. But they'd be more than happy to accept a NeXT box as such a box would welcome new free software.

    This auction gives ID a bit more publicity than a gift to the FSF would...
    That is unless we have a folow up story about how the FSF office has this big old obsolete box waisting space and they can't afford to get rid of it.
    And that is why ID should never donate such a system to the FSF... To much potental ill will

  • We don't need it.

    We already have 192 of these, with 16 *working* processors each.

    Sandia National Laboratory might be interested, though...

  • Wow, a $7,500 space heater. I'll bet it uses a 20A plug.

    That reminds me, I'd better go pay my power bill today.

  • I have used the Vax that was used to develop the first version of Mathematica [mathematica.com] (or so I was told.) This was at Caltech Submillimeter Observatory [caltech.edu] in the early 90s.

    I was told CalTech and Wolfram had a disagreement over who owned the machine, and Caltech moved it to the most inaccessable place they owned to try to keep it. (I take no responsibility for the accuracy of this statement.)

    Another cute feature was the reel to reel tape drive - an old but still used technology at the time. They had a particularly old drive, because all the new ones would auto-feed the tape for you using suction, and they wouldn't work at ~4200m altitude.

  • A collector's item (Score:3)

    by Cubic_Spline ( 211139 ) on Saturday July 22, 2000 @07:44AM (#913523)
    {Cheesy announcer}

    "Comes autographed by the id development team and an official certificate of authenticity!"

  • I have an Alpha that is the identical model to the one that ran Slashdot for the first 9 months of its life, and served the first million pages.

    Make me an offer today, and you too might be
    able to own one of these phenomenal Multias.

    D
  • Even if Id isn't the one auctioning it, it still is news! I'm surprise to see an Origin2000 being auctioned!

    So if it's the fact that it's a supercomputer, and not that it's Id that's auctioning it, that is news, how come what was reported is the fact that ID auctioned, and what they used it for, instead of its capabilities? This is completely irrelevant.

    I repeat: anybody who gives a damn that Id is auctioning a computer they used to create a couple of games is a spoiled yuppie brat. Collectors item my ass. And Taco should not use his story posting priviledge to sell crap.

  • 1) It's not *that* heavy. Any decent floor should hold it. I've wheeled these things around quite a bit. 2) Yeah - these suckers kick out a lot of heat, especially since htye have almost a gig of RAM in there (that generates a lot of heat - you should see the one with 196 gigs of RAM that I work with - the entire room changes weather when you power up :) 3) You can easily get the kind of power this thing draws from a standard residential panel if you have some spare circuits - it doesn't need tri-phase power. 4) It has a 30 amp twistlock plug on it, though I'm not sure how mcuh it actually draws. I think it uses 240 volts, though. Think stove or dryer power.

  • Re:Yeah, but does it run vi? (Score:3)

    by Spirilis ( 3338 ) on Saturday July 22, 2000 @08:37AM (#913527)
    I can't believe you've never heard of an Origin 2000... but anyway... It uses a MIPS R10000 64-bit processor, at either 195MHz or 250MHz (reading off a spec sheet I have)... Supports the XIO I/O system, which sustain 1.25 GB/sec bandwidth for each XIO device. The "maximum rack system" supports: 1 to 64 node cards (multiple numbers of these racks can link together)... to form a 2 to 128 CPU system "I/O bandwidth: 80 GB/sec sustained, 100 GB/sec peak" Supports 128 3.5-inch Ultra SCSI devices, or 16 5.25-inch SCSI devices Supports fibre channel. The stock Origin 2K's run IRIX 6.5 according to this sheet, and it consumes about 5500 watts (rack machine), with 18750 BTU/hr heat production

    I got this all from a small booklet (Product Guide) that I got while on a field trip to SGI in highschool 2 years ago... As for comparing against a dual PIII 800, I'm not sure what the R10K's can do... they're not mega-powerful 64-bit processors but the machine concentrates on the I/O bandwidth more than anything...

  • I don't know what we sell these things for used, but new, a 16p Origin 2000 lists (though sales generally discounts at various percentages that I don't claim to understand) for around $80,000 the last time I checked. It is fairly powerful - you get a *lot* of memory bandwidth in these things (800 megabytes/second between nodes where a node is 2 processors, an I/O channel and a bunch 'o RAM). I would imagine that it would easily take out a PIII 800, dual or otherwise. Also, remember that Irix scales *very* well (though this is running an *old* version) - 16p is very very close to 16 times as fast as 1p.

  • Au contraire (Score:3)

    by the_tsi ( 19767 ) on Saturday July 22, 2000 @04:00PM (#913529)
    Actually, it DOES run linux. Or at least, there's partial kernel support for it. Download a 2.3 kernel and take a peek inside.. there's support for SGI IP27 systems. IP27's are Onyx2 and Origin 2000 boxes. Sure, it may not support multiple-module systems, but since this thing has half the node cards dead, you're set anyway.

    -Chris

  • Re:Things to consider when buying (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    According to "Site Preparation for Origin and Onyx2" (Document 007-3452-001):

    Weight (minimum) 300 lbs
    Weight (maximum) 750 lbs

    Floor loading (minimum) 38 lb/ft^2
    Floor loading (maximum) 95 lb/ft^2

    Voltage 187-264 volts, 1-phase
    Watts (maximum) 9750
    Frequency 43-67 Hz
    Cooling Requirements (max) 33,150 Btu/hr

    ------

    Documentation says the wall plug is a "NEMA 6-30P". It looks the same as used for your washer/dryer (a big round three-prong plug that you insert and then twist into place). IIRC, they use these for boats to connect to harbor power.

    So, to address your concerns:
    1. Your floor should probably hold it up, even fully loaded. Unless you do the install in your kid's (or your own) treehouse.

    2. Heat, on the other hand, is probably going to be an issue, unless you've got some decent central air. The biggest window unit I've seen is 20,000 btu/hr, which *might* hack it for a single module system (as this one is).

    3 and 4. The power requirements aren't too bad, but you'll probably need an electrician to run a new outlet from your main to your new air conditioned server room to power this beast as well as the a/c for it. :) Most residential wiring probably won't handle 220V/30A.... for very long anyway.

    ----

    That doesn't change the fact I still want one. $10K is a good deal for a O2000 with 8xR10K's. Maybe when I win the Big Game this week...

    -Chris
  • I'm not sure, but the voltage that falls smack in the middle of the range there is 208V... Which is also a standard voltage for computing devices (there are many UPS' for 208V wiring). I believe this was done to keep current requirements down, but I think the 230 VAC available in a residential district is adequate.

    It's a really wide voltage range (probably meant to use 208V if you have it, 230/240 if you don't). Only one problem - most residential power distribution centers/power meters only handle 100A or so, so you have to convince spouse to not cook and do laundry at the same time.

    Uptime hosed because of dinner and laundry. Hmm.
  • 4. Does that come with a color monitor? (grin, Dilbert reference)

    Too bad this isn't a mauve Origin2K; I think they have the most RAM...

  • As an aspiring geek (not smart enough for full geekdom) I'm kinda clueless about computer programming. I love Q2 and Q3, so this article is of interest to me, but I'm a bit confused about something. Why is such a large computer needed to program something that's easily playable on a PC? They make map making utilities for the end users, so I figure it can't be THAT powerhungry... thanks
  • Seriously? Or is just a troll?
  • if my 2500w electric heater (Australian houses mostly don't have central heating) doesnt blow my power point I bet that wouldnt. Your telling me that thing is more than 2500w? right?
  • Rosebud!

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