Experiences When Transitioning to Low-End Workstations? 60
gerddie asks: "Lately, we have seen a lot of companies starting to move their graphics stuff from high end to low end linux workstations (e.g. Dreamworks).
Of course one reason to do such thing is cut costs, and therefore, at our institute we are going to replace or aging SGI O2s with Linux workstations. I wonder if you have experience with such a transition - especially regarding the usability of such machines for (scientific) visualization? What is working well, and where did you encounter pitfalls?"
And for how much are you selling the Octanes? (Score:2)
I'm considering upgrading my Linux workstation to SGI. Ive heard it plays doom really well.
Linux will be faster (Score:5, Informative)
However... With as fast as linux boxes are now, and as old as O2's are, I think you'll see a performace increase on the Linux side. I suggest you run a non-free windowing system instead of XFree86 (you'll find there are some commercial X-es out there that benchmark dramatically faster than XFree), and do a little streamlining of your kernel before putting the boxes live.
Ta!
such as? (Score:1)
Re:such as? (Score:2, Informative)
Metro-X and Xi are the two I've heard about.
Re:such as? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:such as? (Score:2)
Re:such as? (Score:2)
Re:such as? (Score:2)
Switching between the two inputs, the output from the ATI and Matrox cards is _amazingly_ better. Crisp, clean, easily usable @ 1600x1200. Comparitively, the output from the Nvidia cards is blurry and unusable for any length of time . Ev
Re:Linux will be faster (Score:2)
I haven't seen that method be used since I was haxoring a C=64, but now that I think about it if that method could be used now on current hardware
Shake the Magic 8Ball and ask again.
Re:Linux will be faster (Score:1)
O2 and Textures (Score:3, Informative)
my experience (Score:1, Informative)
Our biggest problem has been that many of the cheap boxes were cheap, and at least one needs maintenence weekly.
Re:my experience (Score:2, Informative)
Re:my experience (Score:2, Insightful)
you bought some fuckton of machines to run Linux without first ensuring that they -would- run Linux? A little common sense would've saved you here...
easy, done it several times before (Score:1, Interesting)
I can almost buy, each and every year, a new fast Dell machine with a fast video card for what we paid in support for our old unix workstations.
We go with this general platform:
1. One or two steps below the fastest cpu
2. One step below the fastest video card
3. Default values for all of the other parts including IDE hard disks
4. No monitor - we buy a new one when the old ones brea
O2s to Linux (Score:4, Informative)
If you're used to SGI's extremely high quality "no bullshit" service department you might be in for a rude surprise, however. Even the very high end Dell service plans will only get you someone who goes on site for 30mins to change a component. They neither have the willingness nor the ability to diagnose symptoms, and none of them know ANYTHING about Linux.
This can cause you a lot of pain and suffering if you have difficult-to-localize hardware issues in a demanding environment. My advice would be to either keep your own inventory for severe support scenarios, or go with a system vendor that provides a much higher quality level of field service than Dell's "partners".
There are some issues with Nvidia's OpenGL support (Score:4, Informative)
Re:x86 will be faster (Score:1)
The nice thing about linux though, is that it can read files larger than 2 G's.
Re:x86 will be faster (Score:1, Funny)
Re:x86 will be faster (Score:2)
Ok now we are just making shit up. Dual digit days in uptime
Place I worked at had a Spectrum class HP-3000 (922LX). I was there close to a year before finding out that the other guy didn't know how to restart it either - we had to dig out the manuals and go through the process, had to bring it down to replace a power conditioner.
Re:x86 will be faster (Score:1)
Re:x86 will be faster (Score:2)
Actually I am looking forward to Win 2003 on 64 bit hardware.
The current generation of hardware doesn't excite me. Tomorrow's generation of hardware doesn't excite me either. Seeing the trend, how much faster tomorrow's hardware is th
I am doing this right now... (Score:4, Informative)
Problems you are going to meet are:
1) Big/Little endian issue, and this is one of the worst problems u will meet in your life
2) There are minor code changes that you are going to do, concerning memory allocation.
3) Ofcorse you will have to take care of large file support.
Well, thats what i can remeber at the moment..
Re:I am doing this right now... (Score:2)
I agree. Even when just communicating between processors with different endian schemes it's a mess if you're using a binary protocol. The worst thing is that you can't isolate the higher-level code from the translation unless you create a middle-layer that understands all of the messages.
Re:I am doing this right now... (Score:1)
you can type: $man htonl
Back off. (Score:2)
Re:I am doing this right now... (Score:1)
Re:I am doing this right now... (Score:1)
Re:I am doing this right now... (Score:2, Funny)
Aside from the daily erosion of the English language?
Nonsense (Score:2)
For 99% of the usage the Linux emulation of pthreads is fine. We also took advantage of the recursive mutexes, these are a total pain under pure POSIX threads.
Re:Nonsense (Score:1)
Re:Nonsense (Score:2)
Re:Nonsense (Score:1)
QT sounds really neat though, but our users cant stop using the application, so we made a fast port to linux, so they would use the port, and at the same time, rewrite the whole damn thing in QT+python as a totally new version or release or what ever u might call it.
Re:Nonsense (Score:2)
Why people even bother with Lesstif when OpenMotif is available is beyond me.
Re:you're wrong (Score:1)
But out of my personal experience, nothing is as stable as Unix, not evn Linux, (we went through hell to get the simulator running on Linux), but you get the advantage of it being very cost effective, and the stability is not as good, but is good(surely better than M$, which is
Some useful comments here, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
From the post:
I wonder if you have experience with such a transition - especially regarding the usability of such machines for (scientific) visualization?
Not to take anything away from the posters (many of whom are making comments from obvious experience -- e.g. the comments about the different architectures (big-endian vs. little-endian), but usability is, after all, in the eye of the beholder.
One other point (and please note I am not familiar with much outside of FEA type packages) is the software you're using -- does it have a Linux platform support, or are you contemplating making an application switch as well? If so, be prepared for some resistance from the users who will be used to how things work in their big and complex package, and will not want to learn a different big and complex package.
O2 is 7 years old (Score:2)
It was the R10K Indigo2 and its replacement, the Octane that were the 64-bit desktop beasts back in their days.
You'll find the Linux PC to be much faster. The O2 had its advan
Know your requirements and eval based on them (Score:5, Informative)
Absolutely, positively have multiple vendors come in with their graphics workstations and then proceed to evaluate how well your critical applications can run. Expect this process to take months.
Finally, I'm not sure how large and mature your present environment is, but if you're talking about more than a few seats and two or three apps, expect a transition that takes a long time. Let people run their O2's next to their Linux boxes. Eventually, if you give the Linux systems proper care and feeding, you'll see dust start to collect on the O2's. Then, and only then, have you successfully completed your transition.
ROTFL! (Score:2, Interesting)
You are moving from O2s to PCs with Linux, and you are worried because the new machines won't be able to handle the visualization tasks? Worry about what to do with the lack of ethernal coffee pauses while you wait for programs to load or thing to compile, but don't worry about the PCs not handling the task.
Problems you are going to find:
* No 4Dwm replacement, your users are going to have to learn another window manager, sorry. (yes, I know there's a 4Dwm for non-Irix but the thin
Re:ROTFL! (Score:3, Informative)
unless you were attached to those funny 4 bit visuals on the O2s
Do you mean 5-bit visuals? The two most common visuals on O2 were RGBA5551 (common for analog video work) and 8-bit visuals -- RGBA8888 (common for everything else, but slightly slower for realtime video).
Some OpenGL extensions are not available (think those funky SGI, SGIS, SGIX ones, and ARB_mu
Re:ROTFL! (Score:2)
It should come as no surprise that a 2003 PC is faster for some tasks than a 1996 workstation! What might come as a surprise is that for tasks bound by memory bandwidth or disk I/O rather than raw CPU,
Opteron? (Score:1)