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Touchdown! Greaser!
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- Jan 5, 2007
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Cowboy - yeehah!
I used to work in an SGI shop. The Goddard high performance folks I worked with in the late 90s were almost exclusive SGI, from the T3E on the first floor to the Octane space heater on my desk.
And we still have an Origin here (!).
But, this occurred after SGI had basically killed itself producing Windows machines with some clever architecture, at an eye-popping $5000 per seat.
This was a SunFire, one of Sun's last products before (and after) Oracle bought them. It claimed to do pipelining. It sucked. It was basically a web server and nothing else.
Quite a lot of astronomy was done on Suns "in the day." The Kuiper Airborne Observatory is still packed with moldy Sun 2s in VME crates. Sun's reason for existence in the early days was integrated networking, a really really big deal, until every $150 motherboard started coming with integrated ethernet….
The days when this kind of simulation was actually challenging on the hardware are gone. We can run on anything that doesn't suck. I even developed off a Lenovo T61p until it finally blew up 6 months ago.
Trust me on this chief, you could make a SUN SPARC do anything you want, but it was still RISC and was optimized for biz and not any kind of analog modeling or capture. The only reason it would do stuff like that back then was the lack of JVM and Apache embedded.
BTW, the Sun Fire brand name included U-SPARC II and U-SPARC III, but in later years also was sold with the crappy Intel Xenon chip inside. If you had a Intel Xenon Sun Fire, it was hopeless.