My employer has a "spare" SGI Origin 2000, 12 processor version. I am totally unfamiliar with its operating system and available software, so can anybody tell me if its worth trying to rig it up for video editing? It seems a pity to scrap it without some attempt at using its number crunching capabilities.

Am I wasting my time?


Any suggestions / ideas welcome. Thanks.

Ummm, by the looks of it, the Origins are meant for other things like server maintenance. I guess if you could get Windows Server 2003 Enterprise on there you could have something. Whether it will run or not, I don't know. But don't junk it for goodness sake! Keep the spare for the sake of having a spare. That's what I do with my computers! =)

You might want to sell it off if you have no use for it, because computers lose value very fast (about half value every 18/24 months).

There are some high-end video programs that run on SGI, but I know very little about them.
i.e. Discreet Fire and Smoke for editing and finishing, Inferno Flame Flint for effects and compositing. Not sure which runs on SGI (I think they all do).
The latest version of those programs run somewhere around a few hundred thousand.

2- Damn, 12 processors.

Thanks for the suggestions.

The machine was used for CFD modelling and cost £300,000 7 years ago. Value today = £300 scrap.

I am fairly sure that Windows server will not install - but Glenn's idea for Discreet Fire & Smoke is worth further investigation to see if there is a freebie / cut down / demo version.

Thanks for the help!

I suppose there's no good games that run on SGI? Retro gaming might make a good use of older computers.

2- Can you run Linux programs on it? Maybe you can turn it into a server of some sort (i.e. web, FTP, file, database) or turn it into a router.
My guess is that won't work... I know very little about SGI.

Well, how fast is each processor? 12 processors is pretty cool and there is always something an old computer can do, even if it's for playing the original Monkey Island or something ^_^.

I gather the OS is IRIX which is SGIs 64bit flavour of UNIX
I understand that the processors are the R10k type - which I believe is the number of MFLOPS it can execute. I think the processor clock speed is 300MHz - but unlike on PCs, this is not a good indicator of performance. I don't know how many instructions are executed per clock cycle - and being a totally parallel system it gets even more complicated!
I think it may have 2Gb memory per node (a node is a processor pair), although all processors can address all memory locations.....

Hmmm... I think it will be a big job just to get my head round all this stuff.....