Dynedain asks: "Let's suppose that an architecture fraternity suddenly has the opportunity of obtaining a handful or two of old SGI Indigos for little or no cost. What do they do with them? Obvious answer: set up a render farm for their digital projects. Now the question is HOW? We have the ability to network these machines (via TCP/IP on a 10bT network) and a few of us have experience w/ UNIX flavors. We've even been playing with Blender, but it seems to lack network rendering support. Considering we are relative newbies, the limitations of the Indigo (1Gb HD, 96 MB RAM, IRIX 5.3), and the fact that we have no money to spend on licensing, what solutions are available for implementing a 3D render farm with DXF support? Do we cluster? Or do we run network scripts?"

a2800276 asks: "The story that XFS has gone beta raised some questions in my mind. There are now four journaling filesystems available under various OSS licenses and being actively developed for Linux, there being (in estimated order of maturity): SuSE/Namesys's reiserfs, SGI's XFS, IBM's JFS and Tweedie/Redhat's ext3fs. Avoiding the obvious question of why can't the effort going into four different projects be channeled into one, I think a discussion of the particular merits of the different fs's would be interesting."

Boone^ writes: "ZDNet is running an article on the future of Linux when used on Big Iron. Just a bit ago we read about running Linux on a large scale Alpha box, and SGI wants NUMA support in Linux so it can support their hardware configuration. The article talks about how memory algorithms used with 256GB machines would hamper performance on 386s with 8MB ram. So far Linus et al have been rejecting kernel patches that provide solutions for Big Iron scaling problems. How soon before a Big Iron company forks the kernel?"

Motor writes: "Things have been a bit quiet on the XFS front over the last few months, but a beta is finally here." They've got a document to to read before installing, as well as some installation notes on the site. It looks like it's a patch for 2.4.0-test5 kernel, and you can also get it as RPMs, or ProPack.

cmuncey writes: "Salon has an Associated Press article that IBM, HP, Intel, NEC have announced an 'Open Source Testing Lab' for testing Linux for large corporate systems that will open by the end of the year in Portland, OR. The main four sponsors are putting up a couple of million and Red Hat, Turbolinux, Linuxcare, VA Linux, Dell and SGI are also kicking in. The lab itself will be run by a nonprofit corporation that will be neutral in picking the projects to be tested. Sounds a bit better Mindcraft, doesn't it?"

Along with an adventuring band of others, tmatysik writes: "Came across this article in the New Zealand Herald the other day. Seems that Weta Digital is now moving over to Linux for the rendering work on Lord of the Rings. Two quotes from the article especially caught my eye: [1)] 'We were able to get the SGI 1200 servers for about $15,000 each or $7500 a processor, and they run more than twice as fast as the [$40000] Octanes for pure rendering.' [and 2)] 'Just by putting in a Linux processor, the price to do a frame is up to a tenth of the cost as on an SGI workstation [running SGI's Irix operating system] so the things we can attempt are more complex.'" Update: 08/27 09:35 PM by CT : Rebecca from WetaFX sent us pictures of the team, and the mighty stack that shall render lord of the rings.

SGI has released Open Inventor (TM) 3D graphics toolkit to the open source community. You can read the press release here and their FAQ here. I'm sure many people will ask what is this Open Inventor, so could a /. reader give a few words about it?

Thanks to some of the folks from SGI for sending us some information about their latest project. Pretty interesting project -- the largest configuration has 10 PCI busses (busi?) with 24 scsi controllers and 10 disks. And wait'll you see the rest of the stats.

tolldog asks: "At Big Idea Productions, a 3D animation studio, we are looking at ways of improving our network and I/O performance. We have been toying with the idea of loadbalancing the NFS server over multiple machines. We have also thought about buying one large machine with several interfaces. What are the advantages and drawbacks of these methods? Are there other approaches that could work?"

An anonymous reader wrote in to tell us that SGI has announced their latest and greatest MIPS-based computers, the Onyx and Origin 3000 line. Up to 1 TB RAM and 512 processors, all on a single system (not a cluster). Beyond Boxes has a nice summary, too. This is definitely a great system for anyone who wants to have their computer be the size of several refrigerators ;)

Adam Turman asks: "The school where I do tech work in the summers just received a 4-processor SGI Challenge XL Irix machine. As it is a public magnet school serving eight of the poorest counties in Virginia, we have very little money to pay someone to support the machine, and none of us who work here know any Unix past 'cd' and 'ls'. As far as I know, we would not receive any money from the sale of the machine. So, I have to ask: What is this computer best suited doing? Would it be better to hire someone who knows IRIX or learn it ourselves? How much would we need to pay a good systems administrator? Forgive my ignorance of UNIX and related subjects, but I feel that Slashdot is the best place to get ideas for what to do with this system." Any admins nearby looking to donate some time to a worthy cause?

shiwala writes: "id software is auctioning the SGI Origin 2000 used to process all of the map data for Quake II and Quake III Arena." Hemos and I have been debating auctioning off the case that was the 2nd Slashdot (for a six months). I've been trying to find the alpha that was Slashdot for the first 9 months of its life (it served the first million pages: if I only knew that we would serve that many pages every day). Probably donate the $ to the FSF or Project Gutenberg or something. Anyway this id box amuses me: opening bid is $7500.

Signal 11 asks: "I've been doing some research on government security certifications for Linux, specifically the C2 classification put out by the NSA. The results are that there is only one project underway - SGI Linux is apparently a low profile project underway at SGI (sorry for breaking it wide open guys) to get C2 for Linux. They won't begin testing though until 2001. Given that there is virtually no information about this project, however, I rather wonder whether SGI is still pursuing it. My question is: what's being done for C2 or higher classification of Linux right now?"

NetBSD have added another platform to their supported hardware list. As the NetBSD/sgimips and announcement pages say, NetBSD/sgimips is now stable enough to run multi-user, making NetBSD the first OpenSource OS to run on the SGI O2. Currently it's known to work on the R5000 CPU, R10K and R12K are untested due to lack of hardware.

xype writes "I just got a mail from NaN (the company developing Blender) that the new 1.8 release is out now - and it's freeware, without any "optional features one needs to pay for"! B@rt of NaN also gets into detail about NaN's plans around opensourcing parts of Blender." For those in the dark, Blender is a 3D Modeling/Rendering application for Linux [Update by nik: And FreeBSD (freebsd.org hosts the US mirror), and SGI, and Sun, and others]. Its not 3D Studio, but it'll do a lot of the same stuff.

Frequent book reviewer and genuine Englishman Duncan Lawie sent us this first-person account of UK Linux Expo 2000. Proof (not that it was needed) that not only is Linux continuing to grow in the UK as elsewhere, but that the disconnect between suits and geeks remains as evident as ever. Read below for good news and medium news -- thankfully, that seems to be as bad as it gets for this transmission.

On May 23 we requested questions for Greg Lindahl, chief designer of the new NOAA Forecast Systems Laboratories massive Alpha Linux Cluster. Here are his answers. Fascinating stuff for people interested in big-time parallel computing.

nicktook writes: "ZDNet has this story that RedHat has released a full alpha distribution for the 64-bit Itanium processor. Can Itanium hardware even be bought yet?" Not by jes folks, that's for sure. cnoe also sent a link to the official announcement from Red Hat as well. Coupled with SGI's release of Pro64 compilers for Itanium, it seems like Intel's Next Big Chip keeps whispering "penguins." Stunning news from MS on this front is long overdue.

An anonymous reader noted that SGI has announced their latest Linux Workstation. It ships with the new VPro graphics board... you can also look at some specific configurations for the boxes. As always, it's SGI so it's priced in the stratosphere, but at least it's purple and oh-so-lustworthy.

Our original interview with two SCO Presidents somehow turned into responses from just one, returned long after they were promised. Anyway, here are answers to your questions about SCO from David McCrabb, President of their Server Division.