Re: Now: Debian issues, WAS: XFS Filesystem not mounting

Stan Hoeppner
2010-09-15T03:51:05Z

pbrunnen put forth on 9/14/2010 8:07 PM:

> Always was intrigued by the SGI equipment in the labs when I was at
> University... Never played with one though. Checked out the specs of those
> Origin boxes you mention. That was some horsepower for the time.

Some years ago NCSA was selling off some retired 128P O2K systems really
really cheap. I was only about 4 hours away from Urbana Champaign at
the time and was really tempted. I was planning on running _lots_ of
seti@home processes on it, mainly. ;)

The price was really decent for what I'd be getting, but in the end I
just couldn't justify it, no matter how cool it would have been to have
a dual rack 32P SGI Origin 2000 running in the basement, crunching S@H.

The reality check was that I could build a new 4U quad Xeon box at the
time, of about the same overall performance, and with lots more disk,
for a mere fraction of the cost of the used O2K. It wouldn't have the
cool SGI badge or run IRIX, but I wouldn't have to add 220v circuits in
the basement, or acquire a big 220v UPS, or pay a much larger monthly
electric bill.

A single socket 12-core 2 GHz Opteron 6100 series on a SuperMicro mobo
with quad DDR3 memory channels w/32 GB RAM, sitting on your desktop,
would simply run circles around that old 2 rack 32P O2K system, probably
5 to 1 or greater in parallel linpack--for less than $2k.

--
Stan