Monster SGI Onyx2 Cluster

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

There are quite a few retrocomputing channels on YouTube. Here are
some clips from a guy calling himsef “jpkiwigeek”. These are from
several years ago, and his channel hasn’t been active for a long time.
He has, or had, a barn absolutely full of old gear (with a corner of
it reserved for his wife to do her scrapbooking), and I admire a guy
with the hardware chops to actually try to get some of this old stuff
working.

Like this massive SGI Onyx2 cluster, of latter-1990s vintage,
consisting of five compute nodes and five graphics nodes. I think each
node on its own would have had a five- or six-figure price tag when
new, so imagine what the whole setup would have cost.

Tour, parts one and two:

Trying to start it up:

Notice how the graphics nodes are absolutely bristling with AV ins and
outs. Could it have been used for cinema work? Or just TV?
(Standard-definition, not HD back then.) All this fancy hardware was
presumably in aid of real-time output, as opposed to taking your time
rendering out high-quality frames at one every few minutes or few
hours and encoding them into a real-time animation in a separate step
-- which is the current approach.

Wonder what the point of that real-time output was? I was thinking
“output to videotape”, but I understand there were available special
VCRs that could capture a frame a time. Or maybe the quality of
step-frame capture wasn’t the best? But they could still render a
bunch of frames, say a few tens of seconds or even a minute at a time,
play them back in real-time from disk or RAM (surely not beyond the
capabilities of such a highly-specced setup) to be capture to tape,
and then edited together into a longer, seamless whole?

Or was this going out for real-time broadcast?

[Scott Lurndal]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
There are quite a few retrocomputing channels on YouTube. Here are
some clips from a guy calling himsef “jpkiwigeek”. These are from
several years ago, and his channel hasn’t been active for a long time.
He has, or had, a barn absolutely full of old gear (with a corner of
it reserved for his wife to do her scrapbooking), and I admire a guy
with the hardware chops to actually try to get some of this old stuff
working.
Like this massive SGI Onyx2 cluster, of latter-1990s vintage,
consisting of five compute nodes and five graphics nodes. I think each
node on its own would have had a five- or six-figure price tag when
new, so imagine what the whole setup would have cost.
http://youtu.be/8k6Ds9xRSEU
http://youtu.be/3-ar1dKBolk
http://youtu.be/oeBE-XWw2lE
Notice how the graphics nodes are absolutely bristling with AV ins and
outs. Could it have been used for cinema work? Or just TV?

Definitely cinima work. Wavefront Maya was one of the key applications
for SGI graphics workstations back in those days.

https://www.hpcwire.com/2002/04/05/sgi-workstations-running-maya-power-blue-skys-ice-age/

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Post by Scott Lurndal
Definitely cinima work.

Video would have been used with optical printers, which was how things
were done in the 1980s. By the latter 1990s, digital compositing would
have been commonplace.

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
Notice how the graphics nodes are absolutely bristling with AV ins and
outs.

Here

is another video on an
earlier-generation Onyx model, from Dodoid’s channel. This is another
channel that was active several years ago, but has gone dormant. He has
done an extensive series on the entire history of SGI, which I found
fascinating.

But if you look at the clip above, you will see a host of analog video
ports (composite, S-VHS, 13W3), plus special connectors like alpha
channel, Genlock time-sync, and “Swap Ready” for synchronizing compositor
buffer swaps between different processing modules.

All of this was clearly for TV/video work, not cinema work. And all
happening in real time, so possibly for live broadcast (sports events?).