It’s been a week without a post, so I’m sure you’re wondering what’s up. Well, it’s been a pretty rough week at the office, and I’ve had way too much on my mind lately to post. There’s some uncertainty here right now that might put me floating my resume again soon, but nothing official yet. I don’t want to start too many rumors, so I’ll just leave it at that.

Also this week we’ve had alot of vendors coming through. Folks from Dell, NVidia, and Verari all came through last week telling us about their plans for the future. Unfortunately, it’s all under NDA so I can’t talk about it. Suffice it to say there wasn’t too much talked about that you can’t already see on The Register, but tthere were a few little nuggets that we’re doing some more research on. One thing neat from NVidia was talk of their new rendering product “Gelato” and “Sorbetto” that you can get from http://film.nvidia.com . Essentially a GPGPU-accellerated version of tools like Mental Ray, it’s supposed to give you film-quality rendering at a fraction of the time of other packages by running on the NVidia Quadro GPU. It’s cross platform and works with Max & Maya, just like Mental Ray, so we’re curious how well it would work on our upcoming Linux Cluster. It would be nice to get rid of a separate Windows Cluster just for rendering.
[tag:job][tag:sgi][tag:gelato]
Also, today we got an ominous phone call from our SGI Sales Rep confirming what we had read a few weeks ago in The Register. Seems they’re dropping the Prism Line and going forward with Altix. Unfortunately, Altix is AGP-bus based where Prism is (was?) PCI-Express bus based, so the graphics capabilities will be sub-par. Hopefully they’re about to release a new version of the Altix with PCI-Express support, but until then it seems SGI is going to continue to lose market share to competitors. Seems they’re also undergoing a huge restructuring as they’ve phased out alot of older products (Neptune, Prism, etc) and fired pretty much their entire management (CEO, CTO, CFO, C*O basically).

So it’s been a pretty hectic week. Hopefully things will stabilize with the job soon and I can post an update. Until then, I wouldn’t expect too many updates as worrying about that has pretty much consumed 100% of my mental-cycles.

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