On August 3, Will Jennings wrote: Oh, neat! I never knew that. Are we talking about front-ends, or console processors? Earlier, Heinz made mention of the SPARC5 doing NFS...that's the console processor of a J90. Earlier Crays run as attached processors with front-end computers. The job runs on the front-end and it ships data to and from the backend at high speed as needed...users didn't "log into" the Cray directly. Today's Crays (and indeed going back about fifteen years or so) run Unicos (a Unix variant) which is a direct-login system...so there's no "front-end" in the old sense of the word. They do, however, use console processors...in the case of the J90, it's an unmodified Sun SPARC5 computer running Solaris (usually 2.4) which handles console operations. It communicates with another SPARC5...a VME64 board in the IOS card cage that netboots a special chunk of code (i.e. not SunOS or Solaris) that handles diags, initialization, booting, and runtime I/O for the Cray processor(s). Most Crays can have multiples of these systems, called IOSs. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Laurel, MD