Nekochan Net

Hi so I just got my hands on a SC072 and its pretty cool. Im having a lot of fun with it. But I was thinking since it has mips processors would it be possible to modify irix to run on it? Any thoughts?

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SiCortex SC072

If you were SGI it would be feasible but otherwise, a LOT of work and some lucky black magic. You'd be better off doing something like the Maxx Desktop.

Since the real advantage of Irix is the close integration of the software and hardware, you're not really missing much by the loss of Irix on other hardware. Irix isn't magic, it just works very well on a certain constrained selection of hardware.

What could be really interesting would be to join Porter's SOM kit with Maxx Desktop. A truly object-oriented 4Dwm desktop on top of Linux/FreeBSD/whatever would be great. The Workplace Shell is killer, best desktop architecture ever designed.

I don't think IRIX has ever run on massively MP hardware. There was something called UNICOS/mp that was based on IRIX and Cellular IRIX, but I wouldn't imagine sources would be easy to find.

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I'm not even sure it would be feasible for SGI. You're talking a slightly different processor architecture, different connection methodology (UNICOS/mp hardware was based around NUMAlink, SiCortex isn't), different firmware, different I/O... possibly different endianness...

It wouldn't be much more work to tweak IRIX to run on PCs.

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Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!

Systems available for remote access on request.

(single-CM)

Well slightly off topic, I thought that the SC072 was supposed to run a custom version of Gentoo mine is running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

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SiCortex SC072

About SiCortex, these are cool, worth a few minutes to read :

http://www.bigncomputing.org/Big_N_Comp ... ortex.html

http://insidehpc.com/2009/06/05/qa-with ... s-for-hpc/

http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2009-05- ... mpany.html

What's sad is that the "business model" in the US today requires a company to make so much money so fast. In other countries, young companies with promise can last longer before they pull the plug. Maybe it was partly their decisions that blew the place up but in China, this place would have got some support. The entire American business model is broken.

on its single Opteron host processor ?

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No mine has a Turion for some reason

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SiCortex SC072

All of a sudden it gave me an error saying "Server Authorization directory (daemon/ServAuthDir) is set to /var/lib/gdm but
this does not exist. Please correct GDM configuration and restart GDM" anyone know how to fix this it wont let me login or anything.

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SiCortex SC072

No.





Turion=low leakage/low power Opteron, SiCortex value proposition was low overall power consumption, thus the reason.

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"Was it a dream where you see yourself standing in sort of sun-god robes on a
pyramid with thousand naked women screaming and throwing little pickles at you?"

You mean like this one, which also appears to run RHEL5?

I'd pick it up at $150, but not at $1,500...

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Then? ... Now? +MLA ... Other: DEC Sun, DG AViiON, NeXT

Thats how much I picked mine up for 150, and mine is in a lot better condition than that.

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SiCortex SC072

I thought you might enjoy some pictures. So here you go

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SiCortex SC072

Neat! Let us know what you do with it, assuming you get past that GDM error. Did you get OS media with the machine? Is something compatible available for download?

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Then? ... Now? +MLA ... Other: DEC Sun, DG AViiON, NeXT

Yes I got the OS media with it. I was able to fix the error so it works great now. Disk 1 contains Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 for the x86 node and Disk 2 contains the modified version of Gentoo called SiCortex Linux for the MIPS processors.

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SiCortex SC072