Looking for IRIX or Solaris expertise? Visit my UNIX Consultancy website.
There’s long been a rumour going round that the Silicon Graphics laptops in Twister were a real product, developed internally, and killed off without seeing the light of day. An SGI laptop is one of those recurring urban legends that everyone wishes was true. You could indeed get a Silicon Graphics laptop, but not in the way everyone thinks.

Twister

The laptops in Twister were fakes. They were mockups made by the special effects department, build around a Silicon Graphics Presenter display wired off-screen into an SGI Indy.

You can read the full story of the effects in Twister on Banned From The Ranch’s website - have a look at http://www.bftr.com/Pages/projects/twister.html

SGI product placement dictated that ALL of the computers in the film had to be SGIs, so we had the task of making not only two distinctly different sets of graphics for nearly every scene, but different-looking EQUIPMENT between the two teams. This was nowhere more evident than with the SGI “laptops,” which of course didn’t exist. With the tireless dedication and help of Dan Evanicky at SGI, we were able to design and build two different fake laptop shells around the SGI Corona LCD flatscreen displays, with seven functional and seven dummy cases for each design, we had a handful to take care of; each “laptop” had a powerful custom backlight run off a separate 12-volt DC power supply and multiple cables which ran back off the set (often through mud and puddles) to the Indy CPUs which fed them.

Congo

Silicon Graphics Indys were used throughout Congo. The TraviCom datacentre featured Indys on the desks - complete with Indycam - as well as the 17″ SGI granite CRTs embedded in the walls and littering the desks.

There was also a mockup Indy laptop that was used in the field by Laura Linney’s character. Again, this was rigged up by the special effects team.

The O2 laptop

When the O2 was being designed and built, some of the team decided to build a laptop around the O2 parts. You can see some screenshots, pictures of the machine, and some background story on the project at http://www.jumboprawn.net/jesse/projs/laptop.html

This was a one-off special build by the engineers working on the O2, and sadly never made it into production.

Military Indys

CRI are a company that build ruggedised military spec machines - essentially taking high performance Silicon Graphics kit, and giving it the full industrial makeover. At the moment they do rugged rack mounted Fuels, but back in the past they also created a rugged Indy laptop.

The old product page has been archived - check out the LinC3D 75-FS Indy laptop.

They were all destined for military use, and doubtless will one day show up at government surplus auctions. Popular rumour has it that one has been up in the space shuttle to the ISS, and that they were also used in ships by the US Navy.

These were the only production SGI laptops made, and they weren’t even made by Silicon Graphics. Given the high price of the Tadpole SPARCbook machines in the 1990s, I shudder to think how much these would have cost. Damn cool though.

Looking for IRIX or Solaris expertise? Visit my UNIX Consultancy website.
Silicon Graphics have just announced that more global shared memory is available with fewer CPUs on their Altix 4700 systems. Increased DIMM density now means you can get an Altix 4700 with 2TB of memory, with only 8 processors.

If you’ve got applications that require large amounts of memory but not much in the way of compute-intensive processes, this is very good news indeed.

Global shared memory is memory which is accessible from all processors/cores. So in an SGI Altix with 1024 processors and 4TB of RAM, any one of the 1024 CPUs can access any part of that 4TB of memory. This is due to the design of Silicon Graphics’ large scale systems, which are Single System Image (SSI) machines - all resources are shared.

Clusters work in a different way, where each node has ‘local’ CPU and memory, and this can’t be accessed from another node.

Both SSI and clusters can scale, but in different ways and with different workloads. Shared memory jobs, where you’re doing lots of memory I/O and you can peg your dataset in physical RAM, don’t scale well with clusters, whereas rendering (where discrete jobs can be chopped up and executed in batches) are just right for clusters but not SSI machines.

With lots of memory density enhancements coming down the line, I’m wondering when Silicon Graphics will break through the 4TB system memory barrier?

Looking for IRIX or Solaris expertise? Visit my UNIX Consultancy website.
McObject are one of those database vendors who you don’t normally hear of, but who are really pushing the boundaries of what can be done with your data.

Their product, extremeDB-64, is written to take advantage of large memory systems by pegging the entire dataset in physical RAM. The advantages are pretty obvious - as are the downsides as well. The McObject guys have really thought about the problems, though, and extremeDB-64 is an impressive database solution.

What’s more impressive is McObject’s recent benchmark and scalability testing, where they test a 1.17 Terabyte, 15.54 billion row in-memory database on a 160-core SGI Altix 4700 server. They measured transaction throughput of up to 87.78 million query transactions per second, which is the sort of uber data-warehousing capability I know a number of businesses would love to get their hands on.

The benchmark white paper is available as a free download - head on over to this page to enter your details.

Looking for IRIX or Solaris expertise? Visit my UNIX Consultancy website.
After Y2K was a comic started by Nitrozac and Snaggy way way back … before Y2K in fact. Sadly it’s no longer being updated, but the archives are still available on the Joy Of Tech website.

The pinnacle of the entire AY2K comic (for me at least, anyway) was when the survivors of the Y2K disaster tried to rebuilt computing using the humble abacus - leading to Abacus World Expo!

And the comic that made me laugh out loud was this one:

You can view the full page here - I can recommend reading from the beginning, it’s good stuff.

Looking for IRIX or Solaris expertise? Visit my UNIX Consultancy website.
He loves his Silicon Graphics Octane. Found this fantastic old SGI promotional video on YouTube, where Steve Jobs shares his love for the Octane.

Admittedly this was when he was CEO at Pixar - it’s not like it was last week or anything. Still worth a chuckle though.

And it’s interesting to note that WETA Digital were still using Silicon Graphics Octanes years later for effects in The Lord of the Rings trilogy.