17 Dec
2007
17 Dec
'07
8:41 a.m.
On 17/12/2007 15:55, Jules Richardson wrote:
My recollection is of 5 or 6 rows of dual-height cabs
in their machine
room, about 6 per row, with a further row or two for disk storage. I
seem to remember that a few of the cabinets were split though - an O2k
in one half, but framebuffer hardware in the other. I'm not sure if they
were supplied like that by SGI as one of their stock models, or whether
it was something custom (when I worked with SGI on projects they were
pretty good at tweaking configuration on a per-site basis).
Sounds like an ordinary (for SGI types of ordinary) Onyx2. That has the
framebuffer hardware in the upper module, and CPUs in the lower; one
framebuffer module per machine, but up to 7 (IIRC) CPU modules in
multi-rack configurations.
It was most impressive to see that much SGI kit in one
place, anyway -
it must have been reasonably uncommon to find such a large-scale install
in a non-government institution.
Biggest I saw in a university was the 32-processor (4 modules, 2 racks)
we had in Computer Science. There was a deskside (8 processor, 1
module) and a later a single rack (2 modules, 16 processors) in Music.
The one I have is a single rack with two modules (16 CPUs), but at
present I have the two modules in separate racks and running as two
separate machines.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York