What's in your kitchen? -Or- The beginnings of a DIY render farm with the *Real* stuff

[gentle_wolfox]

Heh, I haven't been posting much publicly; as I have been working my tail off or ranting and raving in a secret, evil journal. But here's something to chat about because I am also looking for anyone with any ideas to help make the job smoother. Otherwise, I will eventually figure it all out. But here's what's in the kitchen...

Comments

[xaviusarchangel]

Heh, I have no idea what those things are, and yet I'm intrigued about them.

However, my first thoughts when seeing those images were, "I wonder how those things would run Folding@home..." :P

[gentle_wolfox]

I would not expect much, honestly out of the SGI's. In sheer computational strength, they are no greater than a Pentium 3 @ 450 MHz. SGI's power is purely in graphics, and if you can get it to go under OpenGL - well, you're going to need bolts to hold it to the desk. THey make excellent stand alone workstations if all you do is fetch e-mail and browse the web. They are *very* application specific machines. Now the Sunblade on the other hand... if they ported (and I am not sure of this) FAH to Solaris, it would mop the floor compared to anything else. Suns are math *engines* and as such are unparalleled, mini supercomputers... The difference between this machine and a SPARCUltra Center 5500 mainframes is only a few extra processors. Sixpaws wonders if shi can play Quake on them. *Eyeroll*

[skunktaur]

Hmmm... They might juuust be powerful enough to handle Six and me playing ;D

[prismo]

I just want my damn kitchen counter back. :D

[gentle_wolfox]

*Your* kitchen counter? It's *OUR* kitchen counter....I am just borrowing...erm, both halves of shared space. Yeah, that's it. :) Not to worry, I have plans underway to have them off of there come the weekend. One of them is a parts spare box, doesn't even run because someone scavenged the drives and RAM out of it. I won't know which one until I pick them apart again. So the mess will be off the counter soon enough and moved deeper into the living room instead! *duck-n-run*

[gentle_wolfox]

I found ports of Doom, Quake and Quake-2 that's compiled to be SGI native. Who says you cannot have a little bit of old skool fun, eh? The drives on them are tiny though, so to keep a plethora of fun and eyecandy around, I will have to configure NFS and SAMBA to tap into the huge terabyte and a quarter depository I keep lying around on my network as a NAS. (There's where the music is stored for the soon to be extinct radio station and my video collection)