[deerpig]

I have a slightly newer Infinite Reality R10000 sitting beside my desk here in Phnom Penh. A professor in Berkeley gave it to us and somehow we managed to get it to this side of the world. It uses enough power to run an apartment block and yes it is noisy. I will eventually gut it and install a six node linux cluster inside.

I used these boxes in Hong Kong in the early 90's, then later in Japan in the late 90's for a number of projects and I was still using an Indy as my main desktop until 2001.

SGI created hardware that almost took your breath away, you knew you were seeing a future that not many people had the privilege to see back then in person. To me, having the box sitting next to me every day, with "infinite reality" label on the top reminds me of those days when anything seemed possible and all of it was magical. I miss that sense of wonder and infinite possibilities...

[bcaa7f3a8bbc]

>To me, having the box sitting next to me every day, with "infinite reality" label on the top reminds me of those days when anything seemed possible and all of it was magical. I miss that sense of wonder and infinite possibilities...

In the recent 3-5 years, there is a clear revival of the cyberpunk subculture online. Many related hobbyist websites appeared, many new cyberpunk-inspired independent art, music and games are composed, new communities are formed, etc.

Themes include a general nostalgia of the 80s, especially vintage computers, also the 90s early pre-Web 1.0.

The reason? We can clearly see. The lost future that never comes...

[erikpukinskis]

It’s coming. Birthing something like that requires patience. And it always takes longer than you think.

It will come slowly at first, and then all at once.

[spitfire]

Links? I loved Neuromancer, Snow Crash and others of the time.

[aaaaaaaaaab]

Are you talking about vaporwave?

[spilk]

please don't gut rare vintage hardware to install commodity x86 hardware.

[jsjohnst]

10000% agree. Either sell it or even better, donate it to a computer history museum somewhere.

[Annatar]

Yes, please don't do it, for no primitive intel-based system has ever come close to any SGI hardware in terms of elegance. It would be a sacrilege.

[AriaMinaei]

I wonder if it's still possible to put together hardware that's a few years ahead of current high-end products.

Like, can you arrange, say, ten flagship graphic cards for realtime rendering? Do we have game engines that can scale to that number?

[tachyonbeam]

I don't most software can scale to 10 GPUs out of the box. AFAIK, it would be hard to even find a motherboard that would fit them. However, a company could conceivably buy a workstation with 256GB RAM, two 32-core Threadripper CPUs and four Nvidia 2080Ti. That would definitely put you a few years ahead of the average "consumer PC" or next-generation console.

Sidenote: I've read that John Carmack and id Software liked to develop on workstations that were "ahead of the curve" that way. It gave them an edge, in that they were able to develop future games for hardware that didn't yet exist, but knowing that consumer PCs would eventually catch up.

I think what made these SGI computers really amazing at the time is that there was no such thing as accelerated 3D graphics in the consumer market at the time (or much real-time 3D for that matter). They also had a cool Unix operating system with a UI that was way ahead of anything you could get on a consumer PC. I can also imagine that it was a much much more comfortable development environment than developing on say, MS-DOS, which didn't even have multitasking.

[jamesfmilne]

The company I work for builds machines like that for film post production. I’ve been writing software for one with 8 Titan Xp GPUs, and with its disks arrays and GPU expansion chassis its about the size of an Onyx, and draws considerably more power :-)

Unfortunately I wouldn’t say it feels like the future, more like a normal CentOS Linux desktop.

You’ll struggle to get a PC whose BIOS can handle much more than that too.

We used to build clusters for the same thing in the past, but that was largely standard supercomputing stuff but very similar to how the InfiniteReality machines were used. I believe our software once ran on Onyx machines in the dim & distant past.

So in short I wouldn’t say having loads of GPUs is enough to make it feel futuristic.

[erikpukinskis]

I would approach it like this:

1) find some graphics problems which people say are not possible on any near-term hardware

2) study the algorithms and identify low level calculations which, if you could do orders of magnitude more of them, would allow you to solve the problem.

3) get a bunch of FPGAs and try to design a machine which can (very slowly) run that architecture

4) once you’ve got it working, slowly replace the FPGAs with ASICs

5) build a box with 16-64 of everything.

I would avoid polygons, since the current architectures are all extremely good at filling polygons. SDFs and raytracing are where you may find the “not on current gen” problems.

[octorian]

As others have said, the whole point of these machines is that they were NOT simply creative combinations of current high-end commodity products. The whole system architecture, from the CPU, memory, I/O, to the graphics hardware, was custom designed. That's something you really don't see very much of these days.

[pvg]

You could but it's unlikely to impress as much - some fundamental transitions only happen once. I think in this case the big advance is realtime 3d graphics with lighting and texture mapping. Perhaps a really fancy VR setup might have a similar effect although to me, it's less obvious that VR will be something every computer has, the way it seemed obvious that 3d graphics is something every computer will get much better at, in the early 90s.

[whywhywhywhy]

Not quite 10 but here’s a blogpost on making a 7 gpu machine for 3D pathtracing rendering http://tomglimps.com/7_gpu_workstation-1000_octanebench/

[brianpgordon]

Supposedly you could play video games on one of Nvidia's more recent data center products:

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/hgx/

It shows up to the host computer as one really big GPU. Of course, you're going to get worse performance than just a single Titan V because it can handle any game already and there's inevitably going to be latency added by doing work over NVLink/NVSwitch. Those massive GPU products are targeted toward offline rendering or machine learning applications, not so much realtime simulation.

[spitfire]

Do you have contact information?