[Grosvenor]

So there were two computers made with the same bits mid 90s. Origin(compute, blue) and onyx(graphics, purple). Both had deskside and rack systems.

Onyx had a few slots reserved for graphics, original could have more compute boards. But you could certainly put two couple cpu boards in an onyx deskside or rack.

[FarmerPotato]

Uhoh, I think I mistook Oxygen for Origin. It was 25 years ago.

The funny thing was that our Cray sales team, from the C90 and T3D, jumped ship from Cray to SGI before their merger.

So got to set up some Indys as web servers/ Oracle database. Surprise! Same sales team. Then the merger happened and we got the Origin boxes.

[nyrikki]

It must have been more complex then that, I was at the skywalker ranch when onyx was being replaced by o200/2000 and never saw a purple onyx at Kerner(ILM), I had a purple Indy impact as my home machine and was looking for purple. I hated teal with a passion.

Perhaps all the purple rack onyx had been dumped but we dug through ILMs boneyard looking to add to our cxfs cluster, but the FC bus speed was too low.

It is possible that R10k was different or that there were multiple chassis. The desk sides I had experience with required RAM in slot 1, with CPU in slot 2, with up to 4 CPUs on the board.

o200 was more restrictive, with 2 CPUs per chassis, with the ability to cray-link two chassis for a total of 4 CPUs, more required o2000.

But this was a quarter of a century ago or more by now…so I may misremember things.

[Grosvenor]

Oh I think you may be right here. I was thinking originally 2000/onyx 2 which were basically the same system just with or without graphics pipes.

And you’re right origin had three models (maybe more) a tower system (o200), a deskside system (same as onyx2) and a rack (same as onyx2).

For Indy impact so you mean the teal/purple indigo2? Weirdly the teal desktop was named indigo2..

Weird but cool stuff.

[nyrikki]

I actually forgot that they made a low end ‘Indy’ and never saw one. We called the Indigo2 Indy

There were some oddities with ad dollars and prestige clients in the 90s, where systems would be upgraded, avoiding swapping out the serialized, asset tagged parts, yet upgrading systems.

The teal Indigo2s were the original with the impact graphics ones being purple.

But all the Indigo2s I saw typically were r10k + max impact graphics despite the color.

The cases were identical.

But Evans & Sutherland and Lucas are the only places I dealt with SGI, so probably not a good source for typical customer’s experience

[Grosvenor]

I'm tugging at my memory with this page: http://www.sgistuff.net/hardware/systems/index.html

I had a teal Indigo2, an O2, and an Indy at various points. Neat stuff, but time moves on.

There's some complex setups listed in the origin/onyx pages. You could mostly mix and match boards to get what you wanted.

[nyrikki]

I should add, the o200 was a 4u chassis with a desk side skin option.

If you popped off the plastic and had rails you could convert them.

The o200 had stonith (shoot the other node in the head) ports like the o2000 for clustering etc..