> Anyone's guess as to whether SGI will bother back-porting IRIX to the
> installed-base of CRAY-sourced SPARC machines...I'd say not, seeing as they
> sold Starfire back to Sun (woops!).

"back"? It never was part of Sun. My brother-in-law works there in their
benchmarks group. They started many years ago as FPS, Floating Point
Systems, making vector co-processors for mainframes. As the mainframe
market died, they went SMP, and made many-headed beasts. They went with
SPARC as they wanted to get on the coat tails of someone big.

FPS got bought by Cray as an affort to get more towards the open
standards market.

When SGI bought Cray, well, they didn't want a SPARC-using division. :-)
Fortunatly Sun decided to buy them.

He's told some fun stories from their tests. Like how he builds systems
to pound database servers. One system had 4 GB physical, 5000 users
(user0000 -> user4999 inclusive), and about 130 4GB drives. :-)

Take care,

Bill