On Thu, 3 Apr 2003, Adam Bower wrote:

But how well does it compare to one of the SGI VAN (visual area network) systems, this sounds as though it is trying to compete with it. If SGI had given you a quote then you would probably be looking at just over a million quid for a similar system, possibly 400k second hand and thats without support!

Yep! Exactly the original plan from about 5 years ago was for an SGI at about 400K. Evidently they quoted 1 million plus for a system for one uni and another company wheeled in a couple of PC image generators that had better performance!! We recently saw an SGI Onyx system down at BP research which wasn't too impressive!!

Sorry to go a bit off topic!!!