The Sheridan College computer animation program is the first purchaser of the new Silicon Graphics O2 workstation.

The O2 is only one of the new developments Silicon Graphics has announced across many of its product lines with which the company has made broad strides in scalable computing and introduced a powerful, cost-effective new workstation.

Mountain View, Calif.-based sgi has introduced a new desktop workstation line to replace the Indy workstation as well as a family of servers and supercomputers based on scalable shared-memory multiprocessor (S2MP), which allows facilities to scale their computing systems over a single 64-bit product line ranging from $18,700 to over $1.2 million.

‘In the past you had to have an Onyx with Reality Engine to do things you can now do with an O2 and an impact,’ saysHarvey Fong, systems integrator at Toronto-based Dan Krech Productions. ‘It’s another step toward 3D online where you can work with textures with clients and adjust things on the fly.’

Kim Davidson, owner of Toronto-based Side Effects Software, says the developer has had access to the O2 and is very pleased with the compatibility of its Prisms and Houdini software. While the company has not had access to the Origin, he says he doesn’t anticipate any compatibility problems with the servers.

‘The O2 is great news for us and for our customers,’ says Davidson. ‘The next thing to do is figure out ways to take advantage of that new architecture. And the price will really help the freelance market.’

As for the servers, Tony Shoemaker, director of technical operations at Vancouver’s Rainmaker, says it will likely be several months before all issues of operating system stability and software porting for post applications are resolved.

The O2 workstation, which begins at under $10,000, is based on the MIPS R5000 and R10000 processors, providing 10 times the computing power of an Indy. Sheridan, which currently uses Indys, will acquire 25 O2 workstations – 17 powered by R5000 and eight by R10000 processors, the lot valued at $300,000. Sheridan is also instituting a class for international students beginning in 1997.

sgi, the number-one global power in supercomputers and number three in workstations, is offering nine O2 workstation configurations, ranging from $9,400 for 32 mb of memory, an mips R5000 PC 180 MHz cpu and a 1 gb hard disk, to $28,216 for a R10000 175 MHz system.

sgi’s Onyx2 line of supercomputers offers Infinite Reality graphics on the new high bandwidth architecture. The scalable computers support up to four MIPS R10000 processors in the deskside models (and up to 24 R10000 processors in rack systems), and begin at $125,400.

The Onyx2 Reality Monster, a multirack system priced from $1.2 million allows 80 million polygons per second and is up to eight times faster than the current Onyx system. Reality Monster is expected to ship in the second half of 1997; other Onyx2 systems will ship later this year.

The Origin server line ranges from the 200 tower systems priced from $17,867 to the 2000 deskside and rack systems beginning at $46,883, which will ship this quarter.

The S2MP architecture, the fruit of sgi’s purchase of Cray Research in July, eliminates Bus-based systems and incorporates CrayLink interconnect crossbar technology and the Cellular irix operating system, which allow economical scaling as a facility’s power needs grow.