I may have the chance to get a Silicon Graphics Iris L Series computer to experiment with at home. It is model number CMNA011 and from what I know of its history it must be more than about 5 years old. It’s almost as big as a small washing machine and has a high-current 120 VAC plug on it (one blade at right angles to the other). It worked the last time anyone tried - it was once used for finite element modeling, I hear.
No doubt it runs UNIX, probably SGI’s IRIX. I used to work with BSD and SVR4 so that should be no problem. Has what looks like a stack of hard disks, a CDROM reader, and a tape cartridge drive, most with pushbutton number switches like they used to use to set SCSI bus addresses. Don’t know yet if anybody has the root password. There may be a requirement to wipe proprietary data off the disk drives before I can move it - they look old enough to be hard to replace.
Looking around SGI’s web site, especially legacy support pages, I could not find any Iris models, and their site search found nothing with the model number. But I did find a “Challenger” series (based on MIPS) that looks just like it physically, and downloaded the manual for that.
Questions:
Anybody know about Iris versus Challenger?
How can I find out more about what this beast is?
What obstacles might I hit, other than what I pointed out?
What might I be able to do with it?
Most importantly, would men fear me and women adore me, or would everybody think I was an idiot, if I had this thing blinking away in the basement???
It would be a very cool coffee table, bare minimum. But I probably could only run it in cooler weather - near as I can tell it consumes about 2000 W.
Nifty kewl, and I don’t even know for sure what you’ve got. (I found an Iris model manual, but I don’t think it applies.)
Do you know how many/what type of CPUs it has, along with perhaps the amount of RAM? I had to look up specs for the HP PA-8500 a while back, and found most chips rated with a Spec rating. Unfortunately for an organization that rates supercomputers, their plain text tables suck and are hard to read. Try here for slightly better formatted output.
I think cool weather (and perhaps a 20 Amp rated outlet) would be a good idea. I’ve got a Dell Poweredge 4200 (that I’m selling. Buy!) that has dual cpus and dual 720W power supplies, and it heated the room to sweltering in no time. The outlet shouldn’t be a big deal… my friend and I wired one up for our welder in about an hour, thought I’d check at a hardware store about any other requirements, including inspection.
I got that Dell to practice symmetric multiprocessing and RAID control; the thrill wore off after a while, but so long as you’re only paying for the electricity and AC, it sounds like a good deal to me.
Over here, I found that what you’ve got is an SGI Onyx Reality Engine2 System.
According to NASA, the CMNA011 has been in production since at least 1993 and up until 1999, although those aren’t definitive dates - they’ve got a few to sell and those are the manufacturing dates listed for their machines.
You’ll need to look and see if you’ve got the IP21 (R8000) or IP19 (R4400) CPU board. If you’ve got the IP21, then I’m afraid you won’t have a lot of fun using Linux on it - the Linux MIPS page says it is pretty much unsupported. If you’ve got the IP19, then you are in luck - it seems to be pretty well supported.
That doesn’t mean that everything would work, though. Your model isn’t listed explicitly, so I can’t tell if the graphics stuff is supported. Maybe, maybe not. The same goes for the SCSI controller, and network card, etc.
So how powerful is this thing CPU- and video horsepower-wise compared to a well equipped 2.8 GHz Dell with a Radeon 9700 video card I can get for around $ 1,000 or so?
Just joking, I’m afraid. The state of my finances wouldn’t allow me to ship it home even if I stole it - never mind paying a fair price for it.
What I know about the machine is not much. I’m interested in it for (I think) the same reason you are - Mondo Cool Factor.
On the other hand, I do know a bit about Linux so if you have to go that route I’d be glad to give you whatever help I can. My contact info is available in my SDMB profile.
