Visual computing. Part I

As is often the case in IT, this endeavor is purely academic in origin. The story began in 1979 at Stanford, where Professor James Clark, along with his students, led the development of the Geometric Engine. The task at that time was absolutely fantastic - to provide workstations with the ability to operate with three-dimensional images.



Looking ahead, I note that now the fruit of its decision is tasted by users of all modern operating systems for personal computers known to me. So today I will talk about the era of visual computing in UNIX and the SGI company responsible for its birth and sunset.

Silicon Graphics Inc

The value of the engine was also appreciated by sharks of venture capital, which allocated serious money for the development of Silicon Graphics, Inc., created by the professor in 1981. Clark, along with his assistants and graduate students leaving the university in his own office and continues its development under the commercial roof. To implement the concept of the Geometry engine as a commercial product, of course, a hardware component was also required. For reasons known only to the professor and his investors, he did not look for partners among major computer vendors, but decided, along with software, to master the production of computers under his own brand.

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Motorola 68K, the first stone in the garden SGI



The early models of iron horses SGI carried the heart of the production of Motorola - 32-bit CISC-processor 68k. It is worth noting that the personal computer in those days (early 80s!) Was ruled by the 16-bit i8086 stones from Intel. The superiority was not limited to digit capacity - support for 16 MB of RAM compared to 1 MB for i8086, a progressive architecture that allows more efficient use of memory, as well as more instructions in one clock cycle. These factors allowed SGI’s machines to achieve unprecedented performance at the size of an ordinary personalki. Of course, similar hardware was used in other Unix stations, for example from HP or DEC. And here the decisive factor that for many years brought Silicones into the leaders of graphic solutions was software.



Despite the fact that the first “silicone” computers of the IRIS 1000/1200 were just graphic terminals for the VAX monster (digital mainframe), the model from the next IRIS 3130 line became an independent and heavily armed Unix station. The armament was two 300 MB hard drives, a streamer (there was simply no other portable storage) and a ten megabyte Ethernet network card. Despite this, the power of the Motorola stones was no longer enough, and the market demanded new, more productive solutions.

MIPS Architecture

At the same time, when Professor Clark left his university to implement his ideas in the hardware and software SGI, John Hennessy developed a completely new processor RISC-architecture MIPS. Its features were long conveyors at the time with an almost complete absence of locks. Despite the fact that a small number of locks in the pipelines did not allow the execution of complex instructions, the ability to work at high clock frequencies compensated for this drawback and allowed them to be emulated. After three years, the development has matured for industrialization, and Hennessy also leaves the university for the sake of his own brainchild - the company he founded MIPS Technologies. The original concept of working with memory made it possible to remove most of the CPU load to ensure the interaction of peripheral devices with memory - they turn to it independently, having received a certain segment from the processor. The successful ideology of the MIPS architecture was best suited for implementing the SGI engineers' ideas, and the question of who will supply the processors for their computers was decided for many years to come.



The transition to new processors, coupled with the use of their own UNIX SysV dialect as the operating system, allowed SGI to compete on equal terms with Sun, the largest player on the UNIX station market, by the mid-80s.





Indigo Cluster, Fermi National Laboratory, USA



Over the next several years, Silicon Graphics workstations have at their disposal a 64-bit CPU, SCSI interface, 32-bit buses — EISA with Plug-n-play software for connecting internal devices / expansion cards (data transfer rate — 32 MB / sec) and graphic bus GIO (speed - 133 Mb / s). The system bus capacity reached 400 MB / s. To consolidate its victorious march, SGI makes a number of acquisitions - in 1989, the supplier of MIPS Technologies processors was swallowed up with all the giblets. Then, the Siliconists bought as many as two of the three manufacturers of professional 3D programs on the market at the time (Alias ​​and Wavefront). The third player, Softimage, was unexpectedly for everyone a little later acquired by Microsoft.



Meanwhile, amid a general upturn, the company is being abandoned by its founder, James Clark. For the same reasons that prompted to make a similar step at the time and Steve Jobs - the lack of understanding with the environment in leadership circles. Also, like Jobs, who discovered NeXT, Clark did not sit back - he founded a startup called Netscape.

Who ordered the music?

T1000, a robot made of liquid metal. Entirely created in IRIX

The film "Terminator-2"



By the beginning of the last decade of the twentieth century, the SGI hegemony in the market of professional graphic stations became apparent. SGI models from Iris 4D to SGI Indy have become the standard in the industry of special effects production for cinema and visualization of various natural processes. The living creatures of the Jurassic Park, a robot made of liquid metal and everything else in Terminator-2, special effects for the Void and many other films from the mid-eighties to mid-nineties were created on these machines. Later films - “Armageddon” and “The Lord of the Rings” also flaunted special effects created with the help of SGI stations (these were already heavier rendering solutions). Despite the fact that the computers of this office are known to the masses due to their use in film and television broadcasting, these industries were not the only areas of their application.



The concept of "Visual Computing" perfectly fit medicine, microbiology, design, geology and military affairs. Where visualization of real-time processes was required, there were no competitors to SGI solutions. Systems and designers enjoyed great success due to the availability of CAD / CAM applications on this platform. Bourgeois pilots are well acquainted with simulators that are comparable in their realism with real planes, and it is easy to guess that this is due to SGI visualization systems. It is not excluded that similar simulators are used in the training of civil aviation pilots in Russia, however, the facts of the installation of such systems are not known to me.





"Hryun and Stepan" also made in Unix



In Russia, Unix together with computers of cheerful blue, green and purple colors were used, first of all, by animators and video production studios. Of the known, I would like to mention the recognized domestic grandees of Pilot-TV and BS Graphics . At the time preceding the crisis of 1998, the Silicon stations were readily acquired by oil workers and meteorologists, but due to the high cost of both the computers themselves and the software, they did not receive wide distribution from us.