19 Jul
2016
19 Jul
'16
8:03 a.m.
The photo of that unit is entertaining. Whoever buys
it will need to setup
3x 30A 220v outlets. That's going to make some licensed electrician very
happy.
At the old small office I would just pop some breakers out and replace
them with 2 pole 30 amp ones. When it was at the hackerspace there was
some sort of fused cut off switch box on the wall, so I terminated a
twistlock 30A and ran from there over to a subpanel that had the 3
twistlocks for the Cray cabinets. I used A-B B-C C-A phases, so 208V each.
I still have the subpanel and also a SquareD Powerlogic monitor w/ CTs and
stuff that are mounted to the board that was with the system (might be
visible in the picture.) I used a rubber core cable to run between the two
-- which I originally had picked up to temporary run a 6 watt argon laser
system with from time to time.
I originally had 4 of the J932SE systems, they were all HIPPI'ed together
to form one system when used for power engineering for nuclear subs or
something (Bechtel.) I dunno, it was all secret and they destroyed all of
the hard drives and such from the system.
I never really thought the power was that crazy, I work in datacenters and
these days there are single racks using twice what the Cray takes!
I worked with a Cray for a while of about the same
vintage (pre-SGI Cray
running UNICOS and using an Sun SPARC Classic as a helper). It was a large
telco (MCI) and used for fraud-detection on calling cards. It was a
UNICOS-based system in a private Colorado Springs datacenter about two
blocks from some sort of manufacturing site for Cray (the building is on
Rockrimmon in Colorado Springs - the former home of the late Seymour
Cray).
I thought the whole rig was interesting, but it was barely a few weeks
before the whole company went through a near-death experience (two words:
Bernie Ebbers) and I walked across the street to another company and
scored a new gig (it was the late 90's, you could do that sort of thing
then). I never got a chance to get really proficient with the hardware or
with UNICOS. It was my singular regret with that gig, though.
Very cool! NASA LaRC had a J916 system used by some scientists for
something, other than that I don't know of any others. I was a SGI guy at
the same place, had some nice boxes.