SGI Land

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So I’ve been very busy this year working, collecting and playing with my growing collection of SGI systems. My most interesting one to date is the Power ChallengeL that I obtained from an associate who found it destined for the trash at an NYC University.

 

Picking up the Challenge from NYC. It was suprising easy to do this. I’m in Philly.

 

The Challenge didn’t boot due to a power rail issue on the CPU board. However, eBay is still a good resource for this stuff. I actually found a NOS quad R10k 195mhz (IP25) board for a decent price. New board installed it booted right up. Adding in a SCSI2SD on the SE SCSI buss and I was up and running with a clean install of 6.5.22 (the latest for these systems) using booterizer.

I’ve since tracked down more NOS maximum density RAM for the MC3 memory board (64M is the max, filled you get 2048M) and I’ve also recently picked up a 2nd MC3 board with lower density RAM. If i fill them both up w/ max density I have a SGI with 4G RAM. I can also pick up a 2nd CPU board for eight R10k, and finally I can get a 2nd IO4 board to allow multiple SCSI drives (SE) across multiple busses. If only they had released a FiberChannel VME board….

R10K Quad CPU Board

CPU monitor running IRIX (one CPU was missing for a while)

 

The MC3 Memory board for Onyx/Challenge

 

And here is the obligatory hinv from the challenge, so you can see exactly what I have going on:

$ hinv -v
CPU Board at Slot 3: (Enabled)
 Processor 0 at Slot 3/Slice 0: 194 Mhz R10000 with 1 MB secondary cache (Enabled)
 Processor 1 at Slot 3/Slice 1: 194 Mhz R10000 with 1 MB secondary cache (Enabled)
 Processor 2 at Slot 3/Slice 2: 194 Mhz R10000 with 1 MB secondary cache (Enabled)
 Processor 3 at Slot 3/Slice 3: 194 Mhz R10000 with 1 MB secondary cache (Enabled)
CPU: MIPS R10000 Processor Chip Revision: 2.6
FPU: MIPS R10010 Floating Point Chip Revision: 2.6
Main memory size: 2112 Mbytes, 1-way interleaved
MC3 Memory Board at Slot 1: 2048 MB of memory (Enabled)
 Bank A contains 64 MB SIMMS (Enabled)
 Bank B contains 64 MB SIMMS (Enabled)
 Bank C contains 64 MB SIMMS (Enabled)
 Bank D contains 64 MB SIMMS (Enabled)
 Bank E contains 64 MB SIMMS (Enabled)
 Bank F contains 64 MB SIMMS (Enabled)
 Bank G contains 64 MB SIMMS (Disabled)
 Bank H contains 64 MB SIMMS (Enabled)
MC3 Memory Board at Slot 2: 384 MB of memory (Enabled)
 Bank A contains 16 MB SIMMS (Disabled)
 Bank B contains 16 MB SIMMS (Enabled)
 Bank C contains 16 MB SIMMS (Enabled)
 Bank D contains 16 MB SIMMS (Enabled)
 Bank E contains 16 MB SIMMS (Enabled)
 Bank F contains 16 MB SIMMS (Enabled)
Instruction cache size: 32 Kbytes
Data cache size: 32 Kbytes
Secondary unified instruction/data cache size: 1 Mbyte
Integral SCSI controller 0: Version WD33C95A, single ended, revision 0
 Disk drive: unit 2 on SCSI controller 0 (unit 2)
 Disk drive: unit 12 on SCSI controller 0 (unit 12)
Integral SCSI controller 1: Version WD33C95A, differential, revision 0
Integral EPC serial ports: 4
Integral EPC parallel port: Ebus slot 5
Integral Ethernet controller: et0, Ebus slot 5
I/O board, Ebus slot 5: IO4 revision 1
VME bus: adapter 21
VME bus: adapter 0 mapped to adapter 21
EPC external interrupts

 

 

 

Meanwhile I still have my Personal Iris, Indigo1 and Octane:

Running IRIX 4.x, 5.x and 6.5.

So it’s been SGI full on lately, and I’ve been hanging out at the SGI User Group Discord (linked). Hop on in if you want to discuss anything about SGI or are interested in learning about them.