8 Nov
2010
8 Nov
'10
1:19 p.m.
Hi all,
I recently acquired a SPARCengine 440, which is a CompactPCI form
factor SBC. I don't currently have a cPCI chassis in which to test
this thing. Normally I would just hang onto this and wait for a
chassis to present itself, but I would like to know if the card works
before spending resources on the chassis. Is there someone that would
be able to help me out with some testing? I think I could make it
worth your while.
Thanks,
-Jon
8 Nov
8 Nov
1:38 p.m.
On 11/8/10 4:19 PM, auringer tds.net wrote:
I recently acquired a SPARCengine 440, which is a
CompactPCI form
factor SBC. I don't currently have a cPCI chassis in which to test
this thing. Normally I would just hang onto this and wait for a
chassis to present itself, but I would like to know if the card works
before spending resources on the chassis. Is there someone that would
be able to help me out with some testing? I think I could make it
worth your while.
I've sent info privately, but for any other interested parties, the
Sun Netra T1-105 is a single-slot cPCI chassis containing one of these
boards. It's a 1U rackmount uniprocessor 64-bit UltraSPARC server with
two 1"-tall 80-pin fast/wide SCSI bays and (optionally) a CD-ROM or
DVD-ROM drive in the front. It has two 10/100Mbps Ethernet interfaces,
two Cisco-pinout RJ45 serial ports (one is the console), a single PCI
slot, and a non-redundant power supply that is available in both 120VAC
and 48VDC versions. They run current Solaris, as well as NetBSD/sparc64
quite well.
I have run a very large number (probably ~100) of these machines and
I like them a lot.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
1:46 p.m.
Dave McGuire wrote:
I've sent info privately, but for any other
interested parties, the Sun
Netra T1-105 is a single-slot cPCI chassis containing one of these
boards. It's a 1U rackmount uniprocessor 64-bit UltraSPARC server with
two 1"-tall 80-pin fast/wide SCSI bays and (optionally) a CD-ROM or
DVD-ROM drive in the front. It has two 10/100Mbps Ethernet interfaces,
two Cisco-pinout RJ45 serial ports (one is the console), a single PCI
slot, and a non-redundant power supply that is available in both 120VAC
and 48VDC versions. They run current Solaris, as well as NetBSD/sparc64
quite well.
I didn't know that. Does that imply that I can take the cPCI module out
of a T1-105 and put it in a 2U cPCI chassis with three other cPCI boards?
Peace... Sridhar
1:52 p.m.
On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 3:46 PM, Sridhar Ayengar <ploopster at gmail.com> wrote:
I didn't know that. ?Does that imply that I can
take the cPCI module out of
a T1-105 and put it in a 2U cPCI chassis with three other cPCI boards?
You can't have more than one of the CP1500 cards in a single chassis.
-Jon
1:56 p.m.
On 11/8/10 4:52 PM, auringer tds.net wrote:
Actually I'm pretty sure it's possible to disable the bus arbiter and
make them just pull power from the bus. I'm not 100% certain but I
believe I've seen it done.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
I didn't
know that. Does that imply that I can take the cPCI module out of
a T1-105 and put it in a 2U cPCI chassis with three other cPCI boards?
You can't have more than one of the CP1500 cards in a single chassis.
2:10 p.m.
On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 3:56 PM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
?Actually I'm pretty sure it's possible to
disable the bus arbiter and make
them just pull power from the bus. ?I'm not 100% certain but I believe I've
seen it done.
I was going with what Sun said. I actually have four of them and
thought it would cool to set them up as a quad processor system. Do
you have a pointer to where someone has done this?
-Jon
2:10 p.m.
auringer tds.net wrote:
What Dave's talking about and what you're talking about aren't the same
thing. In his configuration, it ends up as four systems in one box.
Peace... Sridhar
Actually
I'm pretty sure it's possible to disable the bus arbiter and make
them just pull power from the bus. I'm not 100% certain but I believe I've
seen it done.
I was going with what Sun said. I actually have four of them and
thought it would cool to set them up as a quad processor system. Do
you have a pointer to where someone has done this?
2:27 p.m.
On 11/8/10 5:10 PM, Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
What Dave's talking about and what you're talking about aren't the same
thing. In his configuration, it ends up as four systems in one box.
Yes, either four independent systems or a "failover" setup.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
Actually I'm pretty sure it's possible to
disable the bus arbiter and
make
them just pull power from the bus. I'm not 100% certain but I believe
I've
seen it done.
I was going with what Sun said. I actually have four of them and
thought it would cool to set them up as a quad processor system. Do
you have a pointer to where someone has done this?
2:46 p.m.
On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 4:10 PM, Sridhar Ayengar <ploopster at gmail.com> wrote:
What Dave's talking about and what you're
talking about aren't the same
thing. ?In his configuration, it ends up as four systems in one box.
Yes, I see that. It might make for an interesting "beowulf" style
cluster to play with though.
-Jon
2:52 p.m.
On 11/8/10 5:46 PM, auringer tds.net wrote:
If you end up doing that, I have a few more of those boards. Though
for clustering applications, while the UltraSPARC-II has excellent
integer performance, it is a bit weak in floating point.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
What
Dave's talking about and what you're talking about aren't the same
thing. In his configuration, it ends up as four systems in one box.
Yes, I see that. It might make for an interesting "beowulf" style
cluster to play with though.
3:10 p.m.
On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 4:52 PM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
?If you end up doing that, I have a few more of those
boards. ?Though for
clustering applications, while the UltraSPARC-II has excellent integer
performance, it is a bit weak in floating point.
Yes, I've heard that before... Oh yes, I think you said that the other
day. :) I wasn't thinking that it would be a great number cruncher,
just that it would be fast enough to make it fun, unlike the stack of
Sparcstation 1s I had thought about trying at one time. :O
Thanks for the input.
-Jon
P.S. Dave, I will give some thought to your offer of the T1-105 and
get back to you.
9 Nov
9 Nov
7:26 a.m.
On 11/8/10 6:10 PM, auringer tds.net wrote:
They'd be a whole lot faster than the SPARCstation 1s of course, but
yes. :)
If you end
up doing that, I have a few more of those boards. Though for
clustering applications, while the UltraSPARC-II has excellent integer
performance, it is a bit weak in floating point.
Yes, I've heard that before... Oh yes, I think you said that the other
day. :) I wasn't thinking that it would be a great number cruncher,
just that it would be fast enough to make it fun, unlike the stack of
Sparcstation 1s I had thought about trying at one time. :O P.S. Dave, I will give some thought to your offer of
the T1-105 and
get back to you.
Ok. Be aware that I'm about to do another road trip (a very not-fun
one this time unfortunately) and will be away for a few days starting
tomorrow.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
8 Nov
8 Nov
2:26 p.m.
On 11/8/10 5:10 PM, auringer tds.net wrote:
*snicker* One thing I'm fond of saying is "The people who know the
least about Sun computers are Sun employees".
I was the guy who figured out that it really is possible to put a row
of Sun-3/50 or 3/60 machines in an x/x80 VME chassis, and in doing so
put together what I believe to have been the first of what we now call
"blade servers", at an ISP in early 1993. Later I did the same thing
with 4/600 boards, building the same thing but with faster "blades". (I
have always the term "blade" as it is commonly applied here)
The 3/50 and 3/60 only pull power from the bus, so that was easy.
The 4/600 is a real VME machine, so it required more fancy footwork; you
need to prevent it from trying to be a bus master. I did that by
locking their VMEbus arbiters into loopback mode in OBP, which works
like a charm. (once I got all the OBP ROMs updated to the version that
supported loopback mode, that is)
Both of these things "could not possibly work", "never",
"definitely
not", etc etc, according to Sun engineering. Then, on the phone, I told
the guy I was leaning up against one that had been running for weeks
with customers on it. That was fun. :)
Actually
I'm pretty sure it's possible to disable the bus arbiter and make
them just pull power from the bus. I'm not 100% certain but I believe I've
seen it done.
I was going with what Sun said. I actually have four of them and
thought it would cool to set them up as a quad processor system. Do
you have a pointer to where someone has done this?
I do not. I know I've seen a single chassis with several CP1500s in
it on different buses in a redundant configuration (this was a
controller for a Summa VCO-4K phone switch) but I think I've seen them
in a master/slave scenario somewhere. I may be thinking of something
else though.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
9 Nov
9 Nov
12:16 p.m.
I was going
with what Sun said.
*snicker* One thing I'm fond of saying is "The people who know the
least about Sun computers are Sun employees".
1:28 p.m.
On 11/9/10 3:16 PM, Tony Duell wrote:
Without wishing to start a flamewar, it is my experience that in many
cases a company's 'customer support' personnel know considerably less
aboput the comptuer than a clueful customer does.
This was a *design engineer*, not a customer service drone.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
I was going with what Sun said.
*snicker* One thing I'm fond of saying is "The people who know the
least about Sun computers are Sun employees".
8 Nov
8 Nov
1:54 p.m.
On 11/8/10 4:46 PM, Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
Dave McGuire wrote:
Yep. The CP1500 was originally designed for telecom applications, it
found its way into a few switches and related hardware. In those
applications they were plugged into larger cPCI chassis which were more
"telecommy".
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
I've sent info privately, but for any other
interested parties, the Sun
Netra T1-105 is a single-slot cPCI chassis containing one of these
boards. It's a 1U rackmount uniprocessor 64-bit UltraSPARC server with
two 1"-tall 80-pin fast/wide SCSI bays and (optionally) a CD-ROM or
DVD-ROM drive in the front. It has two 10/100Mbps Ethernet interfaces,
two Cisco-pinout RJ45 serial ports (one is the console), a single PCI
slot, and a non-redundant power supply that is available in both 120VAC
and 48VDC versions. They run current Solaris, as well as NetBSD/sparc64
quite well.
I didn't know that. Does that imply that I can take the cPCI module out
of a T1-105 and put it in a 2U cPCI chassis with three other cPCI boards?
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ard＠p850ug1.demon.co.uk -
auringer＠tds.net -
mcguire＠neurotica.com -
ploopster＠gmail.com